WHAT IS AN IP ADDRESS

WHAT IS AN IP ADDRESS

1. Introduction: Every machine on the the Internet has a unique number assigned to it, called an IP address. Without a unique IP address on your machine, you will not be able to communicate with other devices, users, and computers on the Internet. You can look at your IP address as if it were a telephone number, each one being unique and used to identify a way to reach you and only you.   
2. An IP address always consists of 4 numbers seperated by periods, with the numbers having a possible range of 0 through 255. An example of how an ip address appears is: 192.168.1.10

    This representation of an IP address is called decimal notation and is what is generally used by humans to refer to an IP address for readability purposes. With the ranges for each number being between 0 and 255 there are a total 4,294,967,296 possible IP addreses.