Re:Ask HN: Is big-endian dead?
by gumby on Friday January 19, 2018 @02:14PM
(#16188859)
FWIW every one of the machines you cited (“Sparc, old MIPS, old PPC, DEC Alpha, etc”) post dated the formation of the Internet (the arpanet transitioning to TCP); the Internet protocols just followed existing arpanet practice. Which was due to big-endian processors being common, but the dominant networked machine of that era was the PDP-10.
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The PDP successor, the VAX, was strangely little-endian.
PDP-11 had a little endian architecture while big endian machines like the PDP-6/PDP-10 predominated on the net.
To make life more interesting, the later PDP-10/20 mainframes used PDP-11 minicomputers as front end processors and often as network processors so byte-swapping was the norm. Luckily the PDP-10 allowed bytes ranging from 1-36 bits wide - “byte” had not yet standardized on 8 bits
Not that strange — it was really the successor of the PDP-11, which was a quite different architecture.