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Instead of trying to show off my technical background, instead I'm going to write this article to target different audiences: technophobes/beginners/Luddite s (mind you, I consider myself a Luddite!) vs. computer professional/geeks/nerds (I'm geek/nerd too. Fortunately, the concept of the Internet Protocol (called "IP" from hereon out) was written by a computer geek who actually wanted to keep things simple, so if you have any computer experience and know how a phone works, you'll find it simple to understand.

1. Technophobe/Beginners/Luddite Description:

The Internet Protocol (IP) is pretty much identical to a phone number, except for network connections, which are usually computers but these days are becoming more and more any kind of device that can connect to a network. So it's simply a way to "call up" or locate and connect to a device on the Internet. And like a phone number, it must be unique to each device.

While a phone number looks like this: (country code) (area code) (prefix)-(number), i.e. +1 212-555-5555, an "IP address" as its known as, looks like this: WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ where each group of letters is a number from 0 to 255, and like phone numbers, there are some places where a number can't be used (for example, WWW and ZZZ can never be a "0".)

Now, the problem that came up for awhile was that this scheme didn't provide enough numbers for all the devices that eventually hooked up to the Internet. The current version of the protocol, commonly called "IPv4" ("v4" means "version 4") could only handle a maximum number of devices, and there was a period of time that those numbers were going to run out. The Internet community was scrambling to roll out a new version of the protocol called "IPv6" or "IPsec" (the latter because "sec" was to point out all the new security enhancements that are part of the protocol) and we're slowly seeing that new protocol being used.

But fortunately, due to routers and the like that allowed many companies and people with multiple devices/computers to set up a "private network" with special IP addresses known as "local/private IP addresses" and just use one public IP address to connect to that company/person's entire network, the need for addresses was greatly reduced. You may have read/heard of this, commonly called a "NAT", which stands for "Network Address Translation", but has become a noun, where someone will call a network that uses one public address for many private IP address a "NAT".

Of course, nobody wants to remember

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