big-endian

(data, architecture)

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 -endian.

big-endian

(networking, standard)

A backward electronic mail address. The world now 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. fred@doc.acme.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 required ad-hockery in their mailers to handle this.

By July 1994 this parochial idiosyncracy was on the way out and mailers started to reject big-endian addresses. By about 1996, people would look at you strangely if you suggested such a bizarre thing might ever have existed.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

References in classic literature ?

Now, the Big-endian exiles have found so much credit in the emperor of Blefuscu's court, and so much private assistance and encouragement from their party here at home, that a bloody war has been carried on between the two empires for six-and-thirty moons, with various success; during which time we have lost forty capital ships, and a much a greater number of smaller vessels, together with thirty thousand of our best seamen and soldiers; and the damage received by the enemy is reckoned to be somewhat greater than ours.

Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments.

View in context

The next day was going to be a big day: Citizens of Bitotia would once and for all establish which byte order was better, big-endian (B) or little-endian (L).

AI's war on manipulation: are we winning?

The FLV format it's a good choice also for the fact that is platform independent: all the data is stored in big-endian byte order.

Coding a library for the creation of audio and video stream files for the internet using open source projects

The byte stream is described as little-endian when the low-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the high-order byte at the highest address; big-endian is the reverse.

Defining digital sustainability

It will be a boutique or proprietary item at best, like Hewlett-Packard Co's big-endian HP-UX on IA-64, they suggest.

Siemens' Sparc Plan Draws Fire on Sun's Solaris x86 Campaign

The Big-Endian Schism and my own role in the War between Lilliput and Blefuscu offers insight into Bilateral relationships (31).

Gulliver's interview

Furthermore, the architecture allows storage references to follow either a big-endian or a little-endian byte ordering convention.

The PowerPC alliance

The N4000, codenamed Prelude uses 360MHz or 440MHz PA-8500 RISCs, but its key technology is a chipset enabling users to upgrade to IA-64 processors - big-endian or little endian to run HP-UX or Windows NT respectively - by swapping out CPU board and bus converter.

HP Says New Mid-Range Server Is a $40bn Unix Opportunity

For example, the Motorola NT compiler must target a little-endian environment that requires CodeView symbolic debugging information, whereas the Motorola C and Fortran compilers for AIX systems use big-endian, XCOFF conventions and a STAB-style debugging format.