Every house on your block has an address. An address uniquely identifies a house situated anywhere in the world - there is no confusion. The unique combination of house number, street name, city, and country can unambiguously identify any house on the planet. A similar analogy that comes to mind are phone numbers - every telephone line in the country has a unique telephone number. So when I call Bob across the street, I can be sure that I’m really calling Bob’s house; his phone number is unique. You get the point already! So, what is an IP Address?

An IP address uniquely identifies a computer on a computer network. IP stands for Internet Protocol. Your computer network at work distributes a unique IP address to your computer every time you turn it on. So within that network, your computer can be recognized by its IP Address. The internet is the largest computer network in the world. Every device that connects directly to the internet is also given a unique IP Address. This is how the world wide web communicates - by IP address.

So what does an IP address look like? Well, its just a bunch of numbers separated by periods. For example, 192.168.0.1 is a valid IP Address. When we browse to a website such as www.pcauthority.ca what we’re really doing is typing in an IP Address - but the best part is, we don’t have to remember the numbers. There are special servers that translate the “www.pcauthority.ca” to the real IP Address such as 123.123.123.123 So all the hard work is done for us! Magnificent.

So to recap - An IP Address is the unique address of a computer on a computer network. House addresses have numbers, street names, city, and country. Telephone numbers have a specific number such as (416) 123-1234. Computer addresses consist of a unique string of numbers, such as 123.123.123.123 Every computer on the internet has a unique IP Address which is used in communication with all the other computers on the internet. Cool? If not, please ask me a question below. Ciao!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under The Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.