The discussion in Big End or Little End Ordering stresses 8-bit character data because you might encounter hardware that uses a different representation of binary data. The Visual Fortran system uses the two's-complement representation of negative binary integers. You might encounter a system that uses a signed magnitude representation, a one's complement representation, or a biased (excess) representation. Additionally, the bit representation of binary floating-point numbers is not unique.
If you transport binary data to or from a different system, you need to know the respective representations to convert the binary data appropriately.