Question

Are there many computers which use Big Endian? I just tested on 5 different computers, each purchased in different years, and different models. Each use Little Endian. Is Big Endian still used now days or was it for older processors such as the Motorola 6800?

Edit:

Thank you TreyA, intel.com/design/intarch/papers/endian.pdf is a very nice and handy article. It covers every answers bellow, and also expands upon them.

Answer 1

There’s many processors in use today that is big endian, or allows the option to switch endian mode between big and little endian, (e.g. SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, Itanium..).

It depends on what you mean by “care about endian”. You usually don’t need to care that much specifically about endianess if you just program to the data you need. Endian matters when you need to communicate to the outside world, such as read/write a file, or send data over a network and you do that by reading/writing integers larger than 1 byte directly to/from memory.

When you do need to deal with external data, you need to know its format. Part of its format is to e.g. know how an integer is encoded in that data. If the format specifies that the first byte of an 4 byte integer is the most significant byte of said integer, you read that byte and place it at the most significant byte of the integer in your program, and you would be able to accomplish that fine
with code that runs on both little and big endian machines.

So it’s not so much specifically about the processor endianess, but the data you need to deal with. That data might have integers stored in either “endian”, you need to know which, and various data formats will use various endianess depending on some specification, or depending on the whim of the guy that came up with the format.