[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 Academic 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
[email protected] 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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {byte sex}{bytesexual}{holy wars}{little-endian}{middle-endian}{NUXI problem}{swab}{vaxocentrism}]