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Endianness refers to the ordering of bytes in memory that make up a larger chunk of memory. There's plenty of information on there on wikipedia for examplemore in depth reading out there, but here's a quick overview. Systems are usually really simple summary. Most computer systems are either big-endian or little-endian. Stealing Here's a table copied from wikipedia's page on endianness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness) that explains the difference:
Endian | First byte | Middle bytes | Last byte | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
big | most significant | ... | least significant | Similar to a number written on paper (in Arabic numerals as used in most Western scripts) |
little | least significant | ... | most significant | Arithmetic calculation order (see carry propagation) |
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