Big-Little Endian

[DanKarron at UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU]

The R2000 processors used in the IRIS-4D series workstations are configured

BIG-ENDIAN.

This means that sign bit at the lowest address byte.

Big-Endian machines number the bytes of a word (size of an int) from
0 to 3. Byte 0 holds the sign and the most significant bits.

For halfwords(size of a short) the bytes are numbered 0 to 1. Byte
0 holds the sign and MSB.

I am quoting the Assembly Language Programmer's Guide, Page 1-1, version 1.

I also wrote some code to import/export IEEE and Big Endian numbers to
VAX Little Endian numbers, so if you need to know this, you probably can use my
code.

Now for the real important question:

Where did the term Big-Little Endian come from ? What is the folklore
behind this jargon ?

Must be heap-bit-tail to tell!

How!
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