4 ms·
A few weeks ago I read the original paper where the names big endian and little endian came from and was really surprised that it was published in 1980! So, be
by guidoism 4y ago
A few weeks ago I read the original paper where the names big endian and little endian came from and was really surprised that it was published in 1980!
So, before then we didn't have a common way of describing this I guess. It's crazy to me if true.
Good paper BTW. Worth reading.
- drfuchs 4y agoBecause pretty much no machine in the universe used little-endian before Intel decided to save a cycle somewhere in the 8008 design, so there was no reason to have a way to refer to it. And even then, nobody paid much attention until IBM put an 8086 into the PC, rather than a Motorola 68X0, right about the time of the article you mention. It's been downhill ever since.
- userbinator 4y agoMultiple-precision arithmetic routines were almost always little-endian.
- guidoism 4y agoI agree with the sentiment but the RFC even mentions the PDP 11 as the first computer to claim being little endian. I wonder if the ascent of C and Unix at that time also contributed to it.
- guidoism 4y agoI’ve been writing a lot of MMIX lately and I really like big endian. It’s so much nicer to watch memory and registers change when ordered this way.
- throw0101a 4y agoThe root of the conflict lies much deeper than that. It is the question of which bit should travel first, the bit from the little end of the word, or the bit from the big end of the word? The followers of the former approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the latter are called the Big-Endians. The details of the holy war between the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians are documented in [6] and described, in brief, in the Appendix. I recommend that you read it at this point. * Danny Cohen, IEN 137 (1 April 1980), https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien137.txt https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien137.txt