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

[John Levine]

In article <B3F2B185-764F-4295-AC48-6C32270B9F4E at comcast.net>,
John Day via Internet-history <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>That was what I always thought.  (We had one of the very early PDP-11/20s, when it was just a PDP-11.)  ;-)
>
>> On Dec 29, 2020, at 23:49, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On 30-Dec-20 16:58, John Day wrote:
>>> Isn’t little endian forced by the byte-order addressing of the PDP-11?
>> 
>> Exactly. But why did DEC decide to number the bytes that way
>> round? I'm guessing that it just seemed natural: byte 0 is obviously
>> less significant than byte 1, just as bit 0 is obviously less
>> significant than bit 1. Much of the world has chosen to disagree. ...

As I said, I've seen lots of speculation but no facts. Bell et al were
surely familar with S/360 and were aware that their design was
incompatible, although I suppose at the time it might not have seemed
important.

I sure hope the 10ns story isn't true.  That would be really sad.

R's,
John

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