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Linda dot com slash brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com, where smart happens him mercial brain With today's question, what is an IP address? Every machine on the Internet has a unique identifying number called an IP address. A typical IP address looks something like this to sixteen dot seven dot sixty one dot one thirty seven. It's made up of four numbers with dots between them to make it easier for US humans
to remember. IP addresses their normally expressed in decimal format as a dotted decimal number like this, but computers communicate in binary form to a computer, and IP address is just a thirty two bit binary number. To sixteen twenty seven dot sixty one dot one thirty seven is a representation of that thirty two bit binary form. The four decimal numbers in an IP address are called octets because
they each have eight positions. When viewed in binary form, if you add all the positions together, you get thirty two, which is why I P addresses are considered to be thirty two bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states, one or zero, the total number of possible combinations per octet is two hundred fifty six, so each octet can contain any value between zero and two hundred fifty five. Combine the four octets and you
get about four billion unique values. Out of those four billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address zero dot zero dot zero dot zero is reserved for the default network, and the address to fifty five dot to dot to dot to fifty five is used for broadcasts. The octets
serve a purpose other than simply separating the numbers. They're also used to create classes of IP addresses that can be assigned to a particular business, government, or other entity based on size and need. The octets are split into two sections, Net and host. The net section always contains the first doctet. It's used to identify the network that a computer belongs to. Host, sometimes referred to as node, identifies the actual computer on the network. The host section
always contains the last doctet. When originally conceived, there was no idea that the Internet would become so popular, But today almost all of the four billion addresses are in use. So there's a new standard called i p V six, where IP addresses become a hundred and twenty eight bits long. This number of bits should allow enough IP addresses so
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