Ken Shirriff
@b0rk
Intel processors are little-endian because they copied the Datapoint 2200, which was a serial computer so it needed to be little endian.
In more detail, the Datapoint 2200 (1971) was built with TTL chips and used shift registers for memory, so it operated on one bit at a time. This forced it to be little endian, since arithmetic needs to start with the lowest bit.
Datapoint asked Intel and Texas Instruments about replacing the board of TTL chips with a single chip. Texas Instruments built the TMX 1795 and Intel slightly later built the Intel 8008. As copies of the Datapoint 2200, they were little endian. Intel improved the 8008 creating the 8080, 8086, x86, keeping the little endian architecture and many other Datapoint features.
I can give you lots of references. See my IEEE Spectrum article https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors
Also see the book "Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans who Invented the Personal Computer."
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