Well in the computer world, just about every wild scheme that you can imagine has probably been tried! Over time the variations that are actually "seen in the wild" have become fewer. For the most part, you will either see pure little endian like Intel or pure big endian like Motorola. Over time, for example "byte" has come to mean "8 bits" although historically that has not been strictly true.
update:
For example in the "famous" IBM punched card format, there are 12 bits available for each printed character. There are actually 3 Hollerith codes which were used with IBM punched cards, I only worked with IBM system 26 and IBM system 29. I never saw the predecessor to System 26 which itself was already obsolete in the 70's.
Anyway each punched card could have 12 bits per character, certainly not "8 bits". This wiki article doesn't clearly explain the difference between the 3 Hollerith codes, but gives an idea Hollerith codes. If there is interest, I can dig up the official names for the 3 Hollerith codes that
IBM used, but I don't think that matters here. The point here being that a single character could have been 12 bits, not 8 bits in the distant past.
More weirdness: the "zigamorph", yes that is an actual word. I think this was 12-11-0-7-8-9 multi-punch. In FORTRAN IV, this signals a comment on the same line as a statement. I never wrote code that used that, but it was a possibility.
System 29 keypunch system 29.
