What is an IP address?

Estimable colleagues

Think about it like this. You have a house. You’d like to invite guests over. And they don’t know where you live. How are they gonna come to your house?

It’s a common problem, so people have defined streets and house numbers: an address for a particular house that only one house in the entire world has. For example, there is only one house in the world which has the address of:

> 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
> NW Washington, D.C. 20500 U.S.A

It’s the same with the internet.

If you want to go to a particular webpage: how does that happen? Each webpage has an address: www.google.com for example. That address is for human beings. Comptuers don’t understand addresses like that – they don’t speak English or “human” for that matter. Computers speak machine language and they only understand addresses if they are in number format – and addresses in number format are called “IP addresses”.

For example (and this is grossly simplified but you get the main point):

www.google.com translates** [sic] to: http://74.125.224.72/ in machine language.

So that address in: www.google.com you ask a computer to take you to that particular address. What happens behind the scenes is that you are taken to: http://74.125.224.72/ . Of course, you are not good at remembering numbers like that, so you simple remember www.google.com and you let computers tell you what the associated IP address is.

And that’s basically what an IP address is. It’s just a unique address consisting of numbers which computers understand. Think of it like a car license plate number. Every webpage has one.

**Sorry to all you purists. I”m just trying to make a point.