A Historical Note

The big-endian/little-endian divide is one of those delightful accidents of computing history where multiple incompatible solutions to the same problem all survived. Unlike the VHS/Betamax wars or AC/DC electrical current (the current war, not the band), neither endianness could claim total victory.

The situation is rather like having two equally valid but completely incompatible systems for measuring temperature, except that someone occasionally tries to add Celsius and Fahrenheit together and wonders why their spacecraft crashes into Mars. Which, incidentally, has happened.