Endianness

Endianness is the way the bytes are ordered in memory, two of the commonly used systems are the following :

  • Most significant byte of word first (Big Endian)
  • Least significant byte of word first (Little Endian)

And with a picture :

endianess

Shamefully copied from Geek and poke, the unicorn picture was found on deviantart.

Relevant Wikipedia article.