🚀 go-pugleaf

rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Richard Stallman) writes:
>US patent number 4,956,809 covers using a single standard byte
>ordering for transfer of data between machines whose normal byte
>ordering is different.
>Unless invalidated (by prior art from mid-1982 or earlier), this patent
>prohibits the principal means for transfering data between disparate
>types of computer systems.
>The simplest way to communicate data between different computers is to
>set up a convention for the ordering of the bytes in any multi-byte
>number.  If the big-endian ordering convention is chosen, then
>little-endian computers must reverse the byte order when they read and
>write network messages.
>This is exactly what is covered by US patent 4,956,809.

Surely this is precisely what is described by Appendix B of RFC791
"Internet Protocol" dated September 1981.  It requires no great leap of
imagination to go from using One Byte Order on all machines for network
header structures to using One Byte Order on all machines for user data in
network packets.