Big endian or little endian??
If you are like me, every time you come across some document that tells the endianness of a protocol or architecture you end up looking up “endianness” on wikipedia and looking at these two images:
I believe that the confusion comes from the fact that in the little-endian, the less significant byte of the word comes first and the most significant byte comes last, so it looks like it “ends big”. Obviously the same happens with the big-endian.
So, how did these confusing names come to happen?
Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.
Yes, engineers are geeks so they sometimes come up with strange names that end up being mainstream. In any case, knowing that the term comes from which end we break to eat a soft boiled egg sheds some light on our little problem.
On little endian, the less significant byte comes first because when eating an egg from it’s little end, the little end is on the top and, likewise, on big endian the most significant byte comes first because when eating it, the bigg end of the egg is on the top.
Mistery solved ;)
