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.
Because 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Comments
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.
Because 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.
I’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.
Multiple-precision arithmetic routines were almost always little-endian.
I 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.