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It seems like most modern(as in, past 20 years) processors have used little endian, or at least preferred it(if bi-endian). Was there a reason that they made big-endian the universal order for all network protocols? Is there any actual advantage to it, except for being easier to use for big-endian processors?

Earlz
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    Your initial premise is incorrect - just because the x86 family is little endian it doesn't follow that "most modern processors" are little endian. – Paul R Mar 17 '11 at 22:54
  • Does bi-endianness mean a preference for little-endian? Or does it mean preference for big endian with a compatibility mode to cope with the "all the world's a {VAX,i386}" syndrome? – Fred Foo Mar 17 '11 at 23:00
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    The Intel chips were an abomination when they first came out - they still are but we're used to them now :-) There were much nicer architectures with more consistent addressing modes and the "correct" byte ordering, such as the 6800 lineage. – paxdiablo Mar 17 '11 at 23:00
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    Read: [ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt) – mwolfetech Mar 17 '11 at 23:06
  • @lars well, for instance, referencing http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/11535/how-to-choose-between-little-endian-or-big-endian-for-the-processor-settings the 6502 processor is faster in little endian. I'd wonder if other architectures aren't the same @pax well hell, the PDP-x architectures have nicer assembly code than the x86 :P. – Earlz Mar 17 '11 at 23:08

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Big endian was probably chosen because the majority of computers of that era (what, the late 1960's?) used it.

How could they predict the popularity of the 80x86 family and its use of little endian so many years later?

According to Wikipedia:

An often-cited argument in favor of big-endian is that it is consistent with the ordering commonly used in natural languages.[9] Spoken languages have a wide variety of organizations of numbers: the decimal number 92 is/was spoken in English as ninety-two, in German and Dutch as two and ninety and in French as four-twenty-twelve with a similar system in Danish (two-and-four-and-a-half-times-twenty). However, numbers are written almost universally in the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, in which the most significant digits are written first in languages written left-to-right, and last in languages written right-to-left.

tomlogic
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