It appears that Al Kossow <
aek@bitsavers.org> said:
I'm not 100% sure but I think this company. hardly more than a footnote in >> computer history, was the cause of little-endian processors.
Guess again
Try the DEC PDP-11 (1969)
Yup. The PDP-11 was definitely the first byte addressed machine with little-endian byte order.
I have looked through every scrap of documentation I can find, and I have never found an explanation of why they did that. They definitely knew it was different
from all the existing byte addressed machines.
Please do us all a favor and DO NOT send in your guesses about why they did, unless they include verified quotes from people who were at DEC in the 1960s. --
Regards,
John Levine,
johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
https://jl.ly
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