It depends. with RS-232 (the old serial port standard) bits were transmitted least-significant-bit first, with the most significant bit sent last [1]. Getting

It depends. with RS-232 (the old serial port standard) bits were transmitted least-significant-bit first, with the most significant bit sent last [1]. Getting back to hex dumps, here's one of some data: 00000000: 6C 6F 77 09 30 0A 66 72 65 65 09 31 32 32 0A 65 low.0.free.122.e You can see it's ASCII. A little endian dump of that would be e.221.eerf.0.wol 65 0A 32 32 31 09 65 65 72 66 0A 30 09 77 6F 6C :00000000 It makes reading any text in binary data a bit difficult. [1] My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer, which had a serial port driven directly by the CPU. I learned pretty quickly which bit goes first.