With today's complicated mesh of networks, addressing is a real problem. Each network has its own address, which is a number, and each host on that network has its own host number. This is the origin of the famous and abstruse IP addresses, which are the ways that networks and hosts address themselves in the world of TCP/IP. Below are some typical IP address.

  138.92.4.254     192.67.231.180

    10.0.0.8         138.92.0.1

These addresses are all 32 bits long but the bits are grouped into 4 8-bit chunks, called octets (the European word for "byte") Things are complicated because there are at least 3 different ways of breaking the octets into the network portion and the host portion.