On 6 Feb 97 at 17:17, Murray Sargent <murrays@microsoft.com> wrote:
> Just for the record, little endian was introduced by IBM with the 360
> back in the mid 1960's. I guess now you can guess how old I am! Intel
> just followed the leader in choosing little endian. I don't want to get
> into a senseless discussion as to which order is natural (I do prefer
> little endian); both orders exist so we need to deal with them.
I can assure you that there is nothing in System 360 or its
successors System 370 and System 390 that could imaginably be
called little endian. DEC processors more recent than the DECSystem
10 are little endian, and it is widely thought that Intel copied
this. There are hardware advantages (fewer gates) to little endian
designs, which are relatively more important on smaller and cheaper
processors.
Is it possible that you're confused about which end is which ?
Tony Harminc
tzha0@juts.ccc.amdahl.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:34 EDT