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PCI-based Power Macintosh computers are mixed-endian because they support both big-endian and little-endian data formats. This appendix presents solutions to some of the problems that the computers encounter because they support both formats.
Although the natural addressing mode of the PowerPC microprocessor is big-endian, PCI-based Power Macintosh computers support little-endian addressing for several reasons:
This appendix first discusses the theory of big-endian and little-endian addressing and then examines how PCI-based Power Macintosh computers deal with the resulting problems and issues.
Note
The terms big-endian and little-endian come from Jonathan Swift's eighteenth-century satire Gulliver's Travels. The subjects of the empire of Blefuscu were divided into two factions: those who ate eggs starting from the big end and those who ate eggs starting from the little end.