Editor religious wars (was Re: Museums)

On 1/26/10, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at update.uu.se> wrote: I don't know about a war, but there was lots of grumbling about it when programmers and software migrated between different architectures. It's not just software - I have some "Rev 0" COMBOARDs where the endiness of the onboard 68000 didn't logically match up with the endiness of the Unibus - there were hardware and software hacks for the prototype boards to get them working enough for the developers to have a platform. Rev 1 boards had the high and low bytes swapped so that writing a 16-bit quantity on one processor would result in the same 16-bit quantity read by the other processor. Nothing new there - there are old network protocol problems as well (talk vs ntalk). It's easy to write code or build hardware for your preferred byte order. Something that's architecture agnostic takes more work. I don't remember much of "my order is the one, true order" except as part of the larger context of Motorola vs Intel or VAX vs Motorola or any of the other architecture wars. -ethan