Endianness matters when you share binary data between computers with different architectures. That didn't happen that often in 1984.

Honestly, byte order didn't matter much. There were so many more dimensions of incompatibility available that byte-order didn't enter the picture when you were choosing a processor for a product. Most data was exchanged via files written to floppy disks, and you just wrote conversion utilities (or programs dealt with save formats on the fly).