History
Historically, byte order distinction was born out of mainframe vs. microprocessor approach. Until 1970s virtually all processors were big-endian. The introduction of microprocessors using initially simpler logic and byte level computations led to little-endian approach.
The problem of dealing with data in different representations is sometimes termed the NUXI problem. This terminology alludes to the issue that a value represented by the byte-string "UNIX" on a big-endian system may be stored as "NUXI" on a PDP-11 middle-endian system; UNIX was one of the first systems to allow the same code to run on, and transfer data between, platforms with different internal representations.
Read more about this topic: Little-endian
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