Endian

Endianness may be seen as a low-level attribute of a particular representation format, for example, the order in which the two bytes of an UCS-2 character are stored in memory. Byte order is an important consideration in network programming, since two computers with different byte orders may be communicating. Failure to account for varying endianness when writing code for mixed platforms can lead to bugs that can be difficult to detect.

The terms Little-Endians and Big-Endians were introduced in 1980 by Danny Cohen in his paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace", (1980). Danny Cohen's paper uses Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) as an allegory for the byte order (aka Endianness) issue which became crucial when computers became interconnected with each other by networks.