Endianness

In little endian, a number is laid out in memory with the least significant byte first. Thus 0x12345678 is stored like so: 0x78 | 0x56 | 0x34 | 0x12.

In big endian, the number is stored with the order of bytes reversed.

Big endian is also referred to as network byte order (See RFC 1700).

Intel CPUs are little endian.