In the early days of computers, pretty much the only thing everyone could agree on was how to represent small positive integers. Other than that, nobody could agree on anything. They couldn’t agree on how many bits were in a byte. Or how many bytes you should work on together (called a “word”). Or how the bytes in a word should be ordered (biggest to smallest, or smallest to biggest). They couldn’t agree on how to represent negative numbers (sign-magnitude or two’s-compliment). They couldn’t agree on how to map letters to numbers (EBCDIC or ASCII). And they really, really, really couldn’t agree on how to represent real numbers (the kind with decimal points in them).

Over time, all these arguments got settled. Except the word ordering one. They still can’t agree on that. And the final decision on how to represent numbers (both integers and real numbers) was worked out…