[ih] byte order, was Octal vs Hex, not Re: Dotted decimal notation

[Brian E Carpenter]

Further P.S.:

Harold McFarland is credited in some sources as the detailed
designer of the PDP-11.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 30-Dec-20 16:30, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> P.S. It happens that Bell learnt to program on an English Electric DEUCE,
> as a Fulbright scholar in Australia, and on DEUCE the bits were numbered
> from 1 to 32, with bit 1 normally written at the left because it came
> out of the serial memory first. Bit #1 represented 2^0; bit #32 represented
> 2^31. It wasn't a choice but a necessity, because a serial adder needs the
> LSB first. So serial machines were little-endian by nature, and extrapolating
> that to byte order might have seemed natural. The other thing about DEUCE
> is that it was a register-to-register machine, and Bell certainly copied
> that for the PDP-11.
> 
> Regards
>    Brian
> 
> On 30-Dec-20 15:40, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>> You'd probably have to find a PDP-11 designer...
>>
>> There was only one, really, Gordon Bell. I'm sure he didn't work alone
>> but for a basic decision like endianness, I'm pretty sure it was him.
>>
>> Allegedly, he's "GBell At Outlook Dot com"
>> http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/
>>
>> Regards
>>    Brian
>>