Little Endian is not arbitrary. If you were going to write a routine to add to numbers that were written in ASCII, you’d necessarily need to start in the ones

Little Endian is not arbitrary. If you were going to write a routine to add to numbers that were written in ASCII, you’d necessarily need to start in the ones position moving to the tens and the hundreds. The computer in the article originally had serial memory. Those values would also need to cycle from the smallest value to the largest. The earliest computers were also serial computers because they were the cheapest to produce.