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From: des@dtg.nsc.com (Desmond Young)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte ordering
Summary: Bit-order is a don't care
Message-ID: <648@blenheim.nsc.com>
Date: 13 Feb 90 02:20:47 GMT
References: <9656@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <1990Feb2.215421.24894@utzoo.uucp> <1990Feb5.192958.12091@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: National Semiconductor, Santa Clara
Lines: 14

In article <1990Feb5.192958.12091@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> I don't see the relevance of RS232.  Nothing except the UART chips ever
> cares about the bit order on the wire; all the computers involved deal
> with the data a byte/character at a time.  It's the same way on Ethernet:
> the bytes are transmitted a bit at a time, but almost nobody knows or
> cares which bit order is used.

Well, not quite. Since the IEEE committees in their wisdom (and I
suppose sort of justified) defined two bit orderings, this has meant
there are people interested in the order.
  Ethernet vs Token-Ring/FDDI.
When converting between the two (bridging), reversing the address
bit orders is a bit of a pain.
Des