Days o' yore ()

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1

I assume you are referring to endianness. The main advantage of little endian is if you have an 8 bit ALU and memory you can process multi byte data by starting with the LSB at the low address and then incrementing the address a byte at a time up to the MSB at the high address. That was the way to minimize hardware on early microprocessors. When you have memory and ALU widths that match larger data types it becomes a moot point. But by that time the damage was done.

There are other solutions. The early IBM System/3 had 8 bit memory access and ALU. The data was still represented as big endian as on other IBM systems. The instructions included the data length (up to a 256 byte operation). What they did was address the highest address (LSB) of the data and then decrement the address to fetch subsequent bytes, ending at the MSB at the low address.

Way more than you wanted to know?

2

I remember bit order and then byte order. Also Dec, 4 too few or many?
Also the 32 bit shell run on the 16 bit OS, etc, 2 bit company that can't take 1 bit of competition. Whe was it that broke bundling and then bundled?

My 4 bit machine was an SR-56.

4

Have you seen a 5 bit computer? On a school trip in the early 60s, I was taken to see "A Computer!" at Ferranti's office in London. Why 5 bit? Because it was programmed using punched paper tape and the tape was only wide enough for 5 holes. It took up a very large room but was probably less powerful than an AT Tiny!