In computing, endianness is the order in which bytes within a word of digital data are transmitted over a data communication medium or addressed in computer memory, counting only byte significance compared to earliness. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE), terms introduced by Danny Cohen into computer science for data ordering in an Internet Experiment Note published in 1980. The adjective endian has its origin in the writings of 18th century Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift. In the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, he portrays the conflict between sects of Lilliputians divided into those breaking the shell of a boiled egg from the big end or from the little end. By analogy, a CPU may read a digital word big end first, or little end first.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the novel from which the term was coined
In computing, bit numbering is the convention used to identify the bit positions in a binary number.
A diagram showing how manipulating the least significant bits of a color can have a very subtle and generally unnoticeable affect on the color. In this diagram, green is represented by its RGB value, both in decimal and in binary. The red box surrounding the last two bits illustrates the least significant bits changed in the binary representation.
