Big-endian Vs. Little-endian

The mnemonics are that:

• big-endian = "big-end-first" : 0x0201 --> 02,01
  
• little-endian = "litle-end-first": 0x0201 --> 01,02
  

Mostly because of the nature of World's languages and of the world-wide used Arabic-numeral system, the Internet Protocol defines a standard "big-endian" network byte order.

To summarize, here are the default endian-formats of some common computer architectures:

• Pure big-endian: Sun SPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC 970, IBM System/360
  
• Bi-endian, running in big-endian mode by default: MIPS running IRIX, PA-RISC, most POWER and PowerPC systems
  
• Bi-endian, running in little-endian mode by default: MIPS running Ultrix, most DEC Alpha, IA-64 running Linux
  
• Pure little-endian: Intel x86, AMD64, DEC VAX (excluding D-Float numbers)
  

It is interesting that... the very terms big-endian and little-endian were taken from the Big-Endians and Little-Endians of Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, two groups of people in conflict over which end of an egg to crack in the voyage to Lilliput and Blefuscu.