I remember reading somewhere that BE was chosen for IP partly for routing efficiency. As you go from MSB to LSB in an IP address you narrow in on an increasingly specific network segment. That's probably not true anymore as smaller and smaller blocks of IPv4 addresses have been handed out (e.g. instead of a full class C).
Right, and also because modern RAM is essentially a block device. You just can’t access individual bytes anymore. E.g. on a typical modern PC with a dual-channel DDR, the block size is 128 bits = 16 bytes.
They're replacing MIPS with ARM as fast as they can but I wonder which endian they're running. Certainly ARM servers will run LE but I wonder if they will bother to produce a BE SDK for networking to ease porting from MIPS BE.
