What's an endian?
The terms big endian and little endian were originally borrowed from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (dean of St Patrick´s Cathedral in Dublin btw), but are now used in computer science.
A computer's endian-ness defines in what way it stores data internally. Some processors store data with the high byte first (Big Endian), while others put it last (Little Endian). Some seem to mix and match (Middle Endian) while others still can switch between different endian-modes (Bi Endian). Ok, now I have probably confused you enough. Let's look at what the dictionaries say.
Techweb's dictionary defines Big Endian this way:
'The order of bytes in a word in which the most significant byte or digits are
placed leftmost in the structure. This is the way humans deal with normal
arithmetic. However, some CPUs are built using the little endian method, which
is just the opposite and places the least significant digits on the left. Since
numbers are calculated by the CPU starting with the least significant digits,
little endian numbers are already set up for the required processing
order.
A bi-endian machine, such as the PowerPC, is built to handle both
types of byte ordering.
In the following example, the decimal number
23,041 (equivalent to 5A01 in hexadecimal) is shown in the big endian byte order and
little endian byte order.'
Big endian Little endian
(Motorola 680x0) (Intel x86)
5A01 015A
Other Endian definitions
Jargon:Big Endian Jargon:Middle Endian Jargon:Little Endian
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
DAV's Endian FAQ (On holy wars and a plea for peace)
Some chips
Chip Endian-ness
Motorola 680x0 Big
Intel x86 Little
Alpha Bi
PowerPC Bi
The site
Endian.net covers high speed chips and operating systems regardless of endian-ness.
It is run by myself (Kenneth Ekman) and is not affiliated to any company or organization. Any opinions expressed are my own and does not represent any one else's views (except in rare cases when they happen to coincide). I graduated from the University of Linköping in 1993 and have worked in the telecom industry since.
The site also works as a test bed lab rat for various ASP/XML/SQL/HTML/CSS/XHTML/PHP/WML/WAP etc.. experiments.
All information is gathered from magazines and news sites and is given as-is. All content copyrights © belong to Kenneth Ekman except where otherwise indicated.
Graphics
A Edlund
No non-disclosure agreements were killed in the making of this site.
You are welcome to contribute
endian.net Mozilla Search-plugin
Site News
1997-08-17 Tech: The Intel Timeline page added to my old personal site
2000-11-20 endian.net opens
2001-01-03 WAP site launched
2002-10-13 Added two news letters: weekly and daily
2002-11-16 Converted database to more suitable format
2002-11-19 You can find links to related roadmap items if you click the [rm] links in the news section.
2002-11-25 The WAP site now have a search page.
2002-11-26 The news.map page shows related roadmap items with each news story.
2002-11-30 Added site news history database
2002-12-01 Visual roadmap page added. Shows what is planned per month, quarter and half year.
2002-12-05 WAP site enhanced with news ←→ roadmap crosslinks.
2002-12-08 Added xml-coded quick specs to processors (not all quite yet...)
2002-12-12 Added a quick specs compare page (reached from the details pages).
2002-12-13 Added Quick Specs to lots of roadmap items
2002-12-16 Added private log analysis page
2002-12-16 Added robots.txt
2002-12-21 Added compare links from roadmap and news details pages
2002-12-28 Changed the site design. Let me know if it doesn’t work with your browser.
2003-01-06 Added user settable site design.
2003-01-13 User password reminder function added
2003-01-24 Added recent updates to default roadmap page, and made a few other minor changes.
2003-02-25 Now the latest daily and weekly newsletters are saved as previews.
2003-03-03 Added the Roadmap Timeline page
2003-04-12 RSS feed for test purposes added at http://endian.net/rssfeed.asp. Only includes news items so far. Contact me with any comments and requests.
2003-04-27 Added description text to roadmap compare pages.
2003-07-10 Moved south bridges and communications standards to new sections in the roadmap
2003-07-10 Improved support for internal roadmap links
2003-08-13 Improved roadmap item cross-linking support and made it available to WAP.
2003-08-23 Added quick specs to south bridges
2003-08-23 Added a RSS-feed for the roadmap section while the RSS-feed for the news section is updated. Still in beta-stage. Comments welcome.
2003-09-08 Now editing the site from a 3GHz P4 with a Radeon 9800 Pro instead of my old steam-driven (450 MHz) PC... :)
2003-10-13 Added Google ads to the site.
2003-10-25 Updated the RssFeeds (roadmap and news)with bugfixes and enhancements.
2003-10-27 Updated the newsfeeds, and actually tested with a feedreader (weak I know)...
2003-11-15 Replaced the Roadmap Timeline with a more readable version.
2003-11-21 Added support for multi-year timelines and removed the Overview page
2003-12-10 XHTML-ified the site.
2003-12-12 Added option to set Portable Mode from the Look page.
2003-12-19 Added an inverted site look in beta form.
2003-12-22 Added a CSS positioned layout to the site look options.
2004-01-04 Added optional details to the Timeline page.
2004-01-09 Made a new favicon.ico instead of the crappy one I used to have.
2004-01-10 WAP site bug fixes (character and tag translation).
2004-02-01 Moved the site from space2u.com to unisite.se.
2004-02-02 Added setting for number of result lines of roadmap and news searches in look page.
2004-03-20 Added option to subscribe to updates of specific roadmap items and related news items.
2004-03-29 Fixed a couple of bugs in subscriptions, so that new users no longer have to log in again for subscriptions to be active. (If you have problems subscribing, please log in from the newsletter page).
2004-05-15 Added roadmap and timeline links from details pages
2004-06-22 Added forum part to roadmap details pages. Registered users may now add their input.
2004-07-22 Changed the default look to the XHTML version. If you dont like it, you can change it from the Prefs page.
2004-09-10 Added RSS list to links page
2004-09-15 Changed news link sort on index page to sort by update time instead of news time.
2004-09-28 Forum user interface no longer requires you to log in to enter comments.
2004-12-30 Set look 11 (with fixed menu in Firefox) to default look.
2005-01-07 Added direct roadmap links from emails.
2005-01-08 Details pages now show current number of subscribers.
2005-11-19 Removed forum from details pages.
2005-11-19 Added a Mozilla - endian.net search plugin link to the about page.
2005-12-27 Unfortunately the weekly and personal mails are currently having some problems. Bugsearch ongoing...
2005-12-30 Email bug hopefully found and corrected. Happy New Year!
2006-02-28 Started the dotnetification of endian.net
2006-03-15 Launched .NET version of endian.net. Bugs may still be here. Please let me know if you see any of them crawl around...
2006-04-13 A few bugs in the user login section straigtened out...
2006-05-06 Found and corrected problems with feedback pages.
2006-05-10 Corrected a few problems with the forum and subscriptions
2006-07-12 Trying out horizontal Google link ad on top.
