Date: 2006Nov20 Q. Please explain "endian" A. This refers to the order of bytes in a word. A 16-bit word is two bytes. So the issue is the order of those two bytes. The number 0xAABB is represented:

0xAA 0xBB with big Endian (aka Network order) 0xBB 0xAA with little Endian (aka Intel order)

For more than you want to know about this see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endian