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] adj. 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
current in mid-1991, are big-endian. See
little-endian,
middle-endian,
NUXI problem. 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; e.g.,
me@uk.ac.wigan.cs. 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).
