Take a moment and think about your home address. That’s right — the house or apartment you live in. What is your address?

It probably follows a format like this:

It’s all very logical: if your street has 25 homes on it, all the homes must have a unique house number while sharing a common street name.

Here’s how this relates to IP addresses:

As it turns out, your computer also has an address and it looks something like this:

192.168.1.100

…and here’s what it means:

This is also very logical: if your computer network has 5 computers on it (or 50 or 500), all the computers must have a unique computer address while sharing a common network address.

So…why is it called a 32-bit IP address? More on that in another post.