Hi All,
Ah now we have some really good explanations coming along. Thanks to Ken
and Peter for providing the correct explanation. Yep I had some things
quite wrong there.
I found this for Dave:
http://www.ora.com/reference/dictionary/terms/B/Big_Endian.htm
> Big Endian
> A colorful way of describing the sequence in which multibyte numbers are stored in a
>computer's memory.
>
> Storing the most significant byte in the lowest memory address, which is the address
>of the data.
....
> Most UNIXes (for example, all System V) and the Internet are Big Endian. Motorola
>680x0 microprocessors (and therefore Macintoshes), Hewlett-Packard
> PA-RISC, and Sun SuperSPARC processors are Big Endian. The Silicon Graphics MIPS and
>IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors are both Little and Big Endian
> (bi-endian).
>
> The term is used because of an analogy with the story Gulliver's Travels, in which
>Jonathan Swift imagined a never-ending fight between the kingdoms of the
> Big-Endians and the Little-Endians, whose only difference is in where they crack
>open a hard-boiled egg.
There you go.
Mike
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Lake
University of Technology, Sydney
Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ph: 02 9514 1724 Fx: 02 9514 1628
URL: http://www.science.uts.edu.au/~mikel
Linux enthusiast, active caver and interested in anything technical.
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