Endian

Endian, or endianness, refers to the ordering of bytes within the multi-byte words of digital data in various computer systems.

Description
A system which stores the most significant (first) byte of data at the lowest (first) memory address would be considered big-endian (BE), whereas a system which stores the least significant (last) byte of data at the lowest (first) memory address would be considered little-endian (LE).

Origins
The term comes from 's book , and was codified in a technical paper published in 1980 by computer scientist.

"The Lilliputians, being very small, had correspondingly small political problems. The Big-Endian and Little-Endian parties debated over whether soft-boiled eggs should be opened at the big end or the little end."

History at Apple
The 6502 processors used in the early Apple II series were all little-endian, as were Intel processors used in IBM PCs and later Macs. However, the first Macintosh models based on 68K processors were big-endian. RISC processors used by Apple in PowerPC and ARM-based systems have all been, which means that the system can handle the data both ways.