Big Endian

In big endian, you store the most significant byte in the smallest address. Here’s how it would look:

Little Endian

In little endian, you store the least significant byte in the smallest address. Here’s how it would look:

Notice that this is in the reverse order compared to big endian. To remember which is which, recall whether the least significant byte is stored first (thus, little endian) or the most significant byte is stored first (thus, big endian).

Notice I used “byte” instead of “bit” in least significant bit. I sometimes abbreciated this as LSB and MSB, with the ‘B’ capitalized to refer to byte and use the lowercase ‘b’ to represent bit. I only refer to most and least significant byte when it comes to endianness.

Different ISAs use different endianness. While one way may seem more natural to you (most people think big-endian is more natural), there is justification for either one.

For example, DEC and IBMs(?) are little endian, while Motorolas and Suns are big endian. MIPS processors allowed you to select a configuration where it would be big or little endian.

Why is endianness so important? Suppose you are storing int values to a file, then you send the file to a machine which uses the opposite endianness and read in the value. You’ll run into problems because of endianness. You’ll read in reversed values that won’t make sense.

Endianness is also a big issue when sending numbers over the network. Again, if you send a value from a machine of one endianness to a machine of the opposite endianness, you’ll have problems. This is even worse over the network, because you might not be able to determine the endianness of the machine that sent you the data.

The solution is to send 4 byte quantities using network byte order which is arbitrarily picked to be one of the endianness (not sure if it’s big or little, but it’s one of them). If your machine has the same endianness as network byte order, then great, no change is needed. If not, then you must reverse the bytes.