I looked over that 17 year old Linux Journal article. Most of it was less zany than I expected, but that bit order assertion was there, plainly wrong, and untied to the discussion of bit order issues in contexts where hardware necessarily must order them (and necessarily, to be salable, must correctly reassemble them into bytes, words, etc.) If that assertion was simply struck, the article is somewhat respectable. Apparently, it escaped the timely notice of any competent reviewer.