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Speaker 1: Linda dot com slash brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff
Speaker 1: from how Stuff works dot com, where smart happens him
Speaker 1: mercial brain With today's question, what is an IP address?
Speaker 1: Every machine on the Internet has a unique identifying number
Speaker 1: called an IP address. A typical IP address looks something
Speaker 1: like this to sixteen dot seven dot sixty one dot
Speaker 1: one thirty seven. It's made up of four numbers with
Speaker 1: dots between them to make it easier for US humans
Speaker 1: to remember. IP addresses their normally expressed in decimal format
Speaker 1: as a dotted decimal number like this, but computers communicate
Speaker 1: in binary form to a computer, and IP address is
Speaker 1: just a thirty two bit binary number. To sixteen twenty
Speaker 1: seven dot sixty one dot one thirty seven is a
Speaker 1: representation of that thirty two bit binary form. The four
Speaker 1: decimal numbers in an IP address are called octets because
Speaker 1: they each have eight positions. When viewed in binary form,
Speaker 1: if you add all the positions together, you get thirty two,
Speaker 1: which is why I P addresses are considered to be
Speaker 1: thirty two bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions
Speaker 1: can have two different states, one or zero, the total
Speaker 1: number of possible combinations per octet is two hundred fifty six,
Speaker 1: so each octet can contain any value between zero and
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty five. Combine the four octets and you
Speaker 1: get about four billion unique values. Out of those four
Speaker 1: billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as
Speaker 1: typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address zero dot
Speaker 1: zero dot zero dot zero is reserved for the default network,
Speaker 1: and the address to fifty five dot to dot to
Speaker 1: dot to fifty five is used for broadcasts. The octets
Speaker 1: serve a purpose other than simply separating the numbers. They're
Speaker 1: also used to create classes of IP addresses that can
Speaker 1: be assigned to a particular business, government, or other entity
Speaker 1: based on size and need. The octets are split into
Speaker 1: two sections, Net and host. The net section always contains
Speaker 1: the first doctet. It's used to identify the network that
Speaker 1: a computer belongs to. Host, sometimes referred to as node,
Speaker 1: identifies the actual computer on the network. The host section
Speaker 1: always contains the last doctet. When originally conceived, there was
Speaker 1: no idea that the Internet would become so popular, But
Speaker 1: today almost all of the four billion addresses are in use.
Speaker 1: So there's a new standard called i p V six,
Speaker 1: where IP addresses become a hundred and twenty eight bits long.
Speaker 1: This number of bits should allow enough IP addresses so
Speaker 1: that we never ever run out of them again. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
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