[cctalk] A little off-topic but at least somewhat related: endianness

Hi to the group, I am tinkering with some C-code where I am working on something that can process some microcode. The microcode is from a DG MV/10000 machine and while working on it, I noticed it is in little-endian. That's simple enough to work around but that had me wondering, why do we have big and little endianness? What is the benefit of storing the low-order byte first? Or is that simply just an arbitrary decision made by some hardware manufacturers? I am mostly just curious. Thanks, Peter / KG4OKG