According to my text (978-1-4496-0006-8), Big Endian ISAs is better suited for handling bitmapped graphics than Little Endian ISAs. Intel always uses Big Endian and Motorola always uses Little Endian. PowerPCs were Motorola units. Windows machines were traditionally Intel based. Apple was traditionally Motorola based. This might mean that Windows systems were more capable of handling bitmapped graphics than Apple machines.
Of course this is somewhat shocking to me since the Mac has been touted as being the choice machine of graphic designers. This could mean that the value is held elsewhere. One potential reason being that not all image files are use bitmapping.
Apparently the Windows BMP format was developed on a LE machine; it therefore needs to be converted in order to be read/viewed on a BE machines. Other formats are below:
Big Endian
- Adobe Photoshop
- JPEG
- MacPaint
- Sun raster
Little Endian
- GIF
- PC Paintbrush
- RTF by Microsoft
Dual Support (BE and LE) often via encoding an identifier in the file
- Microsoft WAV and AVI
- TIF
- XWD (X Windows Dump)
To be continued…
Tags: computer architecture, ISA