3 ms·
> Really, it wasn't until the mid-80's and the RISC revolution, where all of a sudden people found themselves designing systems that would be 32 bits wide from
by greenyoda 7y ago
> Really, it wasn't until the mid-80's and the RISC revolution, where all of a sudden people found themselves designing systems that would be 32 bits wide from the very first silicon that the community "decided" that the only true byte order should be BE.
IBM 360-series mainframes were 32-bit and big-endian in the 1960s. (Their earlier computers may have been big-endian too, I'm not sure.)
- cesarb 7y ago> (Their earlier computers may have been big-endian too, I'm not sure.) Yes, their choice of big endian probably came from their earlier unit record equipment, which used punched cards as input, storage, and output. Since punched cards were (sort of) directly human readable, it was natural to use big endian.
- KMag 7y agoAlso, making punch cards bid-endian meant that BCD integers sorted the same way lexographically and numerically, so there wasn't any special sorting mode necessary for numeric fields in punch card sorting machines.
- nineteen999 7y agoIndeed, and the M68K (release in 1979) is big-endian as well.