So, you've got yourself a computer, eh? Well, you'll be happy to be informed that -- guess what -- it stores information! But just not any information, mind you! Indeed it is a very specially encoded form of information. You see, that thar computer stores things like text in this neat-o format called the ASCII character set. (That's not globally important and in reality is quite a trivial fact, but it makes this sound neat anyway.) In any case, all information is stored in a basic structure called a byte (or if you like, a double nybble). Bytes are composed of things called bits. Bits are binary (they can only be either the numeral 0 or the numeral 1). Eight bits makes a byte. From here, the terms get hypocritical. Firstly, a word is (on most modern computers) made of two bytes. Two words then, of course, makes a double word (and logically, four words make a quadword). The ASCII character set contains 256 different combinations of bits within a single byte to represent each of 256 different characters (letters, numbers, symbols, and other funny-looking things that no one knows why they exist). So, every letter in this sentence is represented by a single byte, and thefore that former clause of this sentence is 65 bytes long.
So after you've got all your characters in a row, just how are you going to tell the first one from the last without looking? You give them addresses! Now, logical as that may seem to people who's native language is a variant of English, it's not quite that simple. You see, do you start numbering them off from 0? from 1? from 42? from the beginning? from the end? from the middle?
That debate's been going on for years. There's been two major results:
So for the above statement in this byte order: "So, every letter in this sentence is represented by a single byte"
And for that statement in little-endian byte order: "etyb elgnis a yb detneserper si encetens siht ni rettel yreve, oS"
But that's not all. You see, that only covers the ordering of bytes that are next to each other... What about the order of the bits within each byte? Or the words within a quadword? It turns out that those are covered as variants of the above terms, as well as the term discussed below....
And here we go. As having two choices always makes us feel uneasy, there's a third choice: middle-endian (midendian for short). This is where the neatness comes in. This order refers to any ordering of bytes that doesn't follow the either of the above two orders. So, for a 4 digit number (1234 in big-endian order), you could have 3214, 2143, 1432, 2341, 4231, etc. So basically, midendianess is just the anarchy of the information storage arena.
There's so many ways to write the above sentence example that it would be very time consuming for me to write and for you to read it here. In fact, it would be time consuming to write even one of them. So I'll leave that as an excersize to reader (who aparently already has plenty of time on their hands already!). Basically, just jumble up all the letters in any order you feel like, but make sure it doesn't match either of the other two orders.
There's this great set of works out there by everyone's good ol' literary pal, Swift. I'm sure you've heard of the works, entitled Gulliver's Travels. In there, you'll eventually find a big argument about which end of an egg is best to crack it on (there's actually a war-like event on this very topic!). The "big end" or the "little end" were the choices... though it turned out that midendian was eventually the most effective anyway. There's also similar parallels in other works, such as the proper side to butter your bread in the Dr. Seuss manuals-for-life. Oh, the Gulliver's Travels saga was brought into the technology world by a paper entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen.
There are, of course, several other different meanings.
Many Americans use the archane date notation of "mm/dd/yy" (such as "10/25/98"). This is truely backward from the rest of the world, most say (who usually use the "dd/mm/yy" notation (as in "25/10/98")). But, in reality, it's a merely a midendian notation. (That still doesn't make it right, though.)
Well, you've got the rich people on the "high end" and the poor people on the "low end". Yet, the people in the middle aren't called the "middle end". Why not? I have no idea. (Well, the dominant theory is that you can't have an "end" in the middle of a line, but I don't see truth in that.) So, if for some reason you ever see the word "midend" laying around, you'll know what it means. (This has connections with the some of my other hypocritical english essays, such as Where did all the chairpeople go? and Why are "White Elephants" not white nor elephants?.)
This term has also been known to represent the holy magic number of 42, though these reports cannot be fully confirmed (by anyone except Brock, of course).