We quickly discovered that a fair bit of Linux software (or at least Debian packaging of same) only worked properly on 64-bit DEC Alpha because the architecture was Little Endian; 32-bit pointers would typically "just work(™)" because the code was grabbing the first 32 bits, and the other half of the pointer addresses was typically 0x0.

Since we were porting to Big Endian hardware (just now discovered Itanium was selectable, not sure why it was Big Endian in our case) we were getting a fair bit of null pointer exceptions.

Anyway, ancient history, but that was my only direct exposure to endian-madness, so it has stuck with me.

I then worked on the FreeBSD port to DEC alpha. I helped with initial bringup and all the various issues around that. Then did a lot of the platform support, and the alpha-specific part of the Linux ABI compat layer, as well as the DEC OSF/1 binary compat layer. I ran a box on my desktop running FreeBSD/alpha as my primary workstation for years (API UP1000).