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

[Brian E Carpenter]

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
>