Computer Instructions: Storage Order

The term "endian" is based on the book Gulliver's Travels, in which the citizens of Lilliput were debating over two customs: breaking an egg either from its small (little) end or big end. Just like them, computer engineers are also divided into two groups: either those preferring to store bytes left-to-right, or those storing bytes right-to-left.

Example: the 2-byte integer $10010111\_01101011$ will be stored either as

Address	$100$	$101$
Content	$10010111$	$01101011$

if we follow the big endian principle, or as

Address	$100$	$101$
Content	$01101011$	$10010111$

if we follow the little endian principle.