Difference between revisions of "Big-endian"

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'''Big-endian''' is a term created by Danny Cohen (technically, he re-purposed it from Jonathan Swift's satire, "Gulliver's Travels", where it refers to the dispute over whether to start eating a boiled egg from the big end or the little end) for the different schemes for ordering and numbering [[bit]]s and [[byte]]s within larger entities.
 
'''Big-endian''' is a term created by Danny Cohen (technically, he re-purposed it from Jonathan Swift's satire, "Gulliver's Travels", where it refers to the dispute over whether to start eating a boiled egg from the big end or the little end) for the different schemes for ordering and numbering [[bit]]s and [[byte]]s within larger entities.
  
'Big-endian' refers to machines (like the [[IBM System/360]]) which number the bits and bytes from the least significant (low-order) end.
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'Big-endian' refers to machines (like the [[IBM System/360]]) which number the bits and bytes from the most significant (high-order) end.
  
Since the preponderance of machines in use when the protocols of the [[TCP/IP]] [[protocol suite]] were developed were big-endian, that became (and remains to this day) the order in which bytes in [[word]]s are sent over the network. Therefore, big-endian byte order is sometimes called '''network byte order'''.
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Since the preponderance of machines in use when the protocols of the [[TCP/IP]] [[protocol suite]] were developed were big-endian, that became (and remains to this day) the order in which bytes within [[word]]s are sent over the network. Therefore, big-endian byte order is sometimes called '''network byte order'''.
  
 
==See also==
 
==See also==
  
 
* [[Little-endian]]
 
* [[Little-endian]]
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==External links==
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* [https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien137.txt On Holy Wars and a Plea For Peace] - Danny's note which introduced the terminology
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[[Category: Computer Basics‎]]

Latest revision as of 13:23, 27 February 2024

Big-endian is a term created by Danny Cohen (technically, he re-purposed it from Jonathan Swift's satire, "Gulliver's Travels", where it refers to the dispute over whether to start eating a boiled egg from the big end or the little end) for the different schemes for ordering and numbering bits and bytes within larger entities.

'Big-endian' refers to machines (like the IBM System/360) which number the bits and bytes from the most significant (high-order) end.

Since the preponderance of machines in use when the protocols of the TCP/IP protocol suite were developed were big-endian, that became (and remains to this day) the order in which bytes within words are sent over the network. Therefore, big-endian byte order is sometimes called network byte order.

See also

External links