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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