A good way to
remember big-endian is to think of the situation as the "
NUXI problem". That is, if you had four single-byte
characters stored in
memory to spell "
UNIX" on a 32-bit system, it would be spelled as
NUXI in
memory.
The
x86 processor is little endian, while the
PowerPC processor is bi-endian (meaning it can be either
little-endian or big endian).
Endian compatability is one of the big considerations in writing portable software. Moving between different processor platforms can be hard because of this storage convention. It's getting easier however, as most new chips are adopting the little endian convention.