Little Endian 1325
Tom Linden
Little topic shift, just curious when, how and why Digital adopted this addressing scheme?
John Sauter responded:
The term is only meaningful with reference to a byte-addressing instruction set. The PDP-10's ILDB and IDPB instructions (and the more-primitive byte instructions on the PDP-1) counted bytes from the high to the low part of the word, so they were big-endian. As far as I know, the PDP-11 was DEC's first little-enian computer. I found it confusing at first because I was accustomed to big-endian, but after a while it became second nature for me, and by the time the VAX came out I would have found big-endian confusing.
I believe the term was first coined by Tom Hastings, as a way of poking fun at those who felt strongly that one way or the other was better. The reference is to Gulliver's Travels and the story of those who broke their eggs on the big or little (narrower) ends.
Or, you could get the least significant bits of the mantissa. Mantissa-last ordering was common on...
As for why DEC adopted it, I can only guess that it was simpler to build the PDP-11 this way.
I can't speak to how or by whom, but why I can explain. Many computers before the PDP-11 were "little-endian" to a limited extent. For example, the Honeywell DDP...
This is all from memory; feel free to correct any errors.
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