Author: Stan Eisenstat
Subject: On Holy Wars and a Plea For Peace
Date: Monday, 31 Aug 2020, 19:40:17

IEN 137                                              Danny Cohen
						     U S C/I S I
						    1 April 1980


	   ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE



		      INTRODUCTION


This  is  an  attempt to stop a war.  I hope it is not too late and that
somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again.

The latecomers into the arena believe that the issue is:  "What  is  the
proper byte order in messages?".

The root of the conflict lies much deeper than that.  It is the question
of  which  bit  should  travel first, the bit from the little end of the
word, or the bit from the big end of the  word?  The  followers  of  the
former  approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the
latter are called the Big-Endians.  The details of the holy war  between
the  Little-Endians  and  the  Big-Endians  are  documented  in  [6] and
described, in brief, in the Appendix. I recommend that you  read  it  at
this point.
...