Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!iconsys!mmm
From: mmm@iconsys.UUCP (Mark Muhlestein)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: DECstation 3100 info. (LSB stan
Message-ID: <317@iconsys.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 89 12:25:03 GMT
References: <2932@imagen.UUCP> <46500043@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: mmm@iconsys.UUCP (Mark Muhlestein)
Organization: ICON International, Inc., Orem, UT
Lines: 19

In article <46500043@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
><All machines
><used the MSB standard until DEC "improved" the situation in 1970.
>
>Really? Can't anyone think of an exception? I seem to recall that
>1620's (circa 1960) stored the least significant (decimal) digit
>first. (Recall that a character was two digits, and an integer,
>2 to 20000 digits). Isn't that "little endian"?

No.  The IBM 1620 stored numeric data with the most significant digit
first.  However, the operand address referred to the low-order digit,
and relied on the presence of a flag bit to terminate arithmetic
operations.
-- 

	Mark Muhlestein @ Icon International Inc.

uunet!iconsys!mmm