Byte Order on workstations

[Jingwen Wang]

  I am a little curious about the byte order differences on different
workstations. 

  When we communicate via sockets over the network, we don't need to care
about the differences between network order and host order. This is true 
if we are communicating among the workstations of the same byte order.

  But If we communicate between workstations of different byte order, .e.g., 
Dec station -- Sun, we must first transform data into network order before 
sending them and change them back to host order after receiving them.

  My question is that in a network environment, how is this problem solved?
For example, when this mail reaches your machine, how does your machine 
know that this mail is from a Sun instead of a Dec Station? How does your
machine process the byte order?

  Can anyone shade some light on this?

Jingwen Wang
Purdue University