IP Addresses

In order for computers to be able to talk to other computers on the Internet, they need to have addresses. The Internet Protocol (IP) addresses were setup in such a way that information could find its way to a destination IP address. The numbers were not randomly given out. They were given out in groups, then subdivided into smaller groups until they were eventually allocated to individual computers. With IPv4 IP addresses are usually written as four positive numbers separated by a ``.''. Each of these numbers is made up of 8 bits. The smallest a number can be is 0 and the largest it can be is 255. A small example number would look something like 1.2.3.4 and a large number would look something like 250.251.252.253. Since each of the four numbers is made up of 8 bits, the whole IP address is made up of 32 bits. With 32 bits there are a total of 4,294,967,296 possible IP addresses.