What Is Big-Endian?

If you need clarification about organizing your data, don't worry: there's an easy way to remember which system is which. In a big-endian system, the essential data is arranged on the left side of a page, and the least important is on the right, just like in books or magazines. In a little-endian system, it's quite the opposite: The essential data is at the bottom of a page, and less significant bits are at the top. The endianness of a computer system is an attribute that determines the order in which bits are stored within data. The most popular conventions for endianness are big-endian and little-endian, but there are others. Big-endian systems store the most significant byte first, with all other bytes following in decreasing significance. Little-endian systems store the least significant byte first, with all additional bytes increasing in importance. While big-endian systems have been used extensively since computers existed, modern PCs use little-endian architecture. When sending data over a network, a receiver operating one kind of endianness could misinterpret data coming from another system if they use a different endianness. When this happens, it can cause problems because you'll need to make changes to your program or application, so it works correctly on both types of machines (or use one computer). In the olden days, there were two ways to store bytes in a computer. You could either use big-endian or little-endian architecture. Big-endian architecture stores the maximum widespread byte first, while little-endian shops the least general byte. This method that in case you have been storing the number "1234", it'd be saved as "3412" in big-endian structures but "1234" in little-endian structures. As of this, the software had to decide whether to store data in a big or little endian format for every piece of data it used. This caused a lot of headaches when you wanted to store numbers from different sources together. If you mixed big and little endians, then some numbers would be interpreted incorrectly! So if you ever have trouble figuring out if your computer has big- or little-endian architecture, remember this simple mnemonic: "The first word on every page goes at the top."