big-endian

(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)

The Lilliputians, being very small, had correspondingly small political problems. The Big-Endian and Little-Endian parties debated over whether soft-boiled eggs should be opened at the big end or the little end.

1. <hardware> 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 current in mid-1993, are big-endian. See NUXI problem, swab.

2. <networking, standard> An electronic mail address the wrong way round. Most of the world follows the Internet hostname standard (see FQDN) and writes e-mail addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the country code (e.g. dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk). In the United Kingdom the Joint Networking Team decided to do it the other way round (e.g. me@uk.ac.wigan.cs) 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 above could be in the U.K. (domain "uk") or Czechoslovakia (domain "cs").

There are signs at last (July 1994) that this parochial idiosyncracy may be abolished, at least in the .ac.uk domain, and mailers may start to reject big-endian addresses. Maybe one day Americans will start to use the .us country code domain instead of .com, .edu, .mil, .gov etc. By that time the net will probably reach other planets and we'll have a whole new set of problems.