1726 AD |
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| In 1274, the Spanish theologian Ramon Lull experienced what he believed to be a divine revelation, in which he invented an eccentric logical technique based on concentric disks mounted on a central axis. Strange as it may seem to us, Lull's followers (called Lullists) flourished in the late middle ages and the renaissance, and Lullism spread far and wide across Europe. | |
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| Of course, Lull also has his detractors (which is a kind way
of saying that many people considered him to be a raving lunatic). In 1726, the
Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels. (On the off chance you were wondering, Swift penned his great work nine years before the billiard cue was invented. Prior to this, players used to strike the balls with a small mace.) |
 Johnathan Swift. Copyright (c) 1997. Maxfield & Montrose Interactive Inc. |
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| Gulliver's Travels was originally intended as an attack on the hypocrisy of the establishment, including the government, the courts, and the clergy (Swift didn't like to restrict himself unduly), but it was so well written that it immediately became a children's favorite. | |
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| In part III, chapter 5 of the tale, a professor of Laputa shows Gulliver a machine that generates random sequences of words. This device was based on a 20 foot square frame supporting wires threaded through wooden cubes, where each face of every cube had a piece of paper bearing a word pasted onto it. | ||
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| Students randomly changed the words using forty handles mounted around the frame. The students then examined the cubes, and if three or four adjacent words formed part of a sentence that made any sense, they were immediately written down by scribes. The professor told Gulliver that by means of this technique: | "The most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." |
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| The point is that Swift is believed to have been mocking Lull's art when he penned this part of his story. (Having said this, computer programs have been used to create random poetry and music ...... which makes you wonder what Swift would have written about us). | ||
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| In fact Swift continues to affect us in strange and wondrous ways to this day. When a computer uses multiple bytes to represent a number, there are two main techniques for storing those bytes in memory: either the most-significant byte is stored in the location with the lowest address (in which case we might say it's stored "big-end-first), or the least-significant byte is stored in the lowest address (in which case we might say it's stored "little-end-first). | Not surprisingly, some computer designers favor one style while others take the opposite tack. This didn't really matter until people became interested in creating heterogeneous computing environments in which multiple diverse machines were connected together, at which point many acrimonious arguments ensued. | |
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| In 1980, a famous paper written by Danny Cohen entitled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" used the terms big-endian and little-endian to refer to the two techniques for storing data. These terms, which are still in use today, were derived from that part of Gulliver's tale whereby two countries go to war over which end of a hard-boiled egg should be eaten first -- the little end or the big end! | ||
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| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
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