Editor religious wars (was Re: Museums)

[Brent Hilpert]

Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 09:35:19AM -0500, Jason McBrien wrote:
> >
> > QBus vs Unibus
> > VT100 vs 3270
> > OS/370 vs VAX/VMS
> > SPARC vs MIPS (vs Alpha)
> >
> > :)
> 
> Was there ever a big endian vx little endian war?

I'm not sure when the war started (earlier one might expect) but there was a
major battle back in the late-70's/early-80's when portable operating systems
and networking were in vogue, and programmers had to account for both orders
within the same code. Danny Cohen's paper "On Holy Wars And a Plea For Peace"
(1980) was one result: 

  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnHolyWarsAndaPleaForPeace
  http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/html/endian_faq.html
  or numerous other links

(I prefer little-endian as it is mathematically consistent, while big-endian is
the result of a disparate mixture of cultural artifacts.)