> "Old Macs are big-endian, just as network processors from NXP. Some Power developers still want big-endian systems to keep the dream alive. But support for bi

> "Old Macs are big-endian, just as network processors from NXP. Some Power developers still want big-endian systems to keep the dream alive. But support for big-endian systems is mostly gone from Linux distributions, and when it comes to developing common utilities or even programming languages, most developers are no more even aware that a world exists outside of little-endian. As much as I love the PowerPC laptop project, I see it now as a dead end: producing hardware for an ever shrinking software ecosystem." Note that PowerPC itself is bi-endian and always has been since the PPC601, configurable via a special register. POWER gained this capability in POWER3 when it subsumed the PowerPC ISA. Old PowerPC Macs are explicitly big-endian because they needed to maintain compatibility with everything written for the earlier MC680x0-based Macs whose CPUs were big-endian-only. Windows NT ran on PowerPC in little-endian mode! https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/cmsc411/website/projects/outer/memory/archs.htm https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/cmsc411/website/projects/outer... https://catfox.life/2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-modern-powerpc-endianness/ https://catfox.life/2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-...