"ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE", Danny Cohen, 1 April 1980
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt. An edited version appeared in IEEE Computer Magazine, October 1981.

This very influential and amusing classic paper introduced the terms LittleEndian and BigEndian and urged people to stop fighting holy wars over which byte ordering was superior. It is still a must-read for anyone who ever has a reason to care about byte ordering.

The terms big-endian and little-endian were borrowed from Swift's satire ''Gulliver's Travels'', in which two countries went to war over the question of which end of a boiled egg should be eaten first.

Formerly BigEndian versus LittleEndian was the subject of many intense holy wars, which have calmed quite a bit in recent years.