Oh, since 8080.
The real fun starts when the CPU offers both, trying to get all the customers. And then some details like bit field insert are inconsistent with both modes.
And little/big endian commes from the Gulliver book by Jonathan Swift where two tribes go to war over the question if eggs should be opened on the big or little end. In computers, it is just so important.
cheers, Gerhard.
Me since the 6800 (used more the 6809 though).
Some power architecture cores do both quite well. Within our vpa toolchain you either use "move.size" (big endian) or "mover.size" (byte reversed, little endian). Neither needs extra opcodes on the cores we have used so far.
Like I said it is no game stopper but there is what is called "network byte order", we read and write left to right, bit fields are consistently addressed only on true big endian (where bit 0 is the most significant bit) etc. All of the problems caused by little endian can be worked around and have been, of course. But one can live without these.
There is a long history. This is from the early days, when the Endian Wars broke out:
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The above was first posted in "Re: the secret sauce" on 8 Jan 2021.
Joe Gwinn
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