On 9/27/06, Tobias Egner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Actually, my issues did indeed turn out to be a big/little endian (who
> came up with that name?) problem
I think it's a reference to Gulliver's travels:
http://www.netrino.com/Publications/Glossary/Endianness.html
The origin of the odd terms big endian and little endian can be traced
to the 1726 book Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. In one part of
the story, resistance to an imperial edict to break soft-boiled eggs
on the "little end" escalates to civil war. (The plot is a satire of
England's King Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church.) A few
hundred years later, in 1981, Danny Cohen applied the terms and the
satire to our current situation in IEEE Computer (vol. 14, no. 10).
Matthew
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