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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 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 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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