Difference between Big Endian and little Endian Byte order

Question

What is the difference between Big Endian and Little Endian Byte order ?

Both of these seem to be related to Unicode and UTF16. Where exactly do we use this?

Answer 1

little-endian: adj.

Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored ‘little-end-first’). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often, bits within a byte.

big-endian: adj.

[common; From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980]

Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address (the word is stored ‘big-end-first’). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes called network order.

---from the Jargon File: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html