3 ms·
Why Apple uses little-endian, while everything else uses big-endian, is another mystery. The Apple-I and Apple-II family were 6502 based machines and the 6502
by cstross 12y ago
Why Apple uses little-endian, while everything else uses big-endian, is another mystery.
The Apple-I and Apple-II family were 6502 based machines and the 6502 was little-endian, would be my guess. Any takers?
- jacquesm 12y agoMore likely a holdover from the power architecture days. I highly doubt a single bit made it from the 6502 days to the power pc days but I would not be at all surprised if some bits made it from the power days to the present.
- huxley 12y agoI think the author is talking about something else (or is confused), the Motorola 68K processors were big-endian and the PowerPC had a big-endian mode (which was used by both PowerMacs and other POWER architecture systems). Intel x86 processors are little-endian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Endianness_and_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Endianness_and_hardw...
- q3k 12y agoThis is not about the endianness of the processor, but about the endianness of the RSA signatures placed in the file - which is a programming decision, not an architecture/hardware one. Apple machines are little-endian, as are any other IA32e machines. The rest of the common 'full' architectures (ARM, MIPS, Power, SPARC, ...) are bi-endian, that is they can switch endianness on demand via a register. People have finally realized Little Endian is the only true endianness ;).