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.

