The use of this redundant [little-endian and big-endian] coding was necessary to avoid huring anyone's feelings when the [ISO 9660] standard was developed. If the standard had dictated little endian, then people from companies whose products were big endian would have felt like second-class citizens and would not have accepted the standard. The emotional content of a CD-ROM can thus be quantified and measured exactly in kilobytes/hour of wasted space.

Andrew Tanenbaum, _Modern Operating Systems_ #