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 | + | '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 | + | 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== | ||
Revision as of 16:07, 19 April 2021
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.
