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big-endian adj.
[common; From Swift's "Gulliver's
Travels" via the famous paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for
Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980]
1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given
multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has
the lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most
processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the
Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC
designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes
called `network order'. See little-endian,
middle-endian, NUXI problem, swab. 2. An
Internet address the wrong way round. Most of the world
follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting
with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the
country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking Team had decided to do
it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was
established. Most gateway sites have ad-hockery in their
mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular,
the address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in
JANET's big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the
standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American
Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.
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