When you're working with millions upon billions of computers, you usually need something to tell each one apart. That's where IP addresses come in. They're actually almost exactly like street addresses, except…harder for people to remember. Just like every apartment or house or company office gets its own, unique address, every computer on the internet connects from a unique IP address.

There's just one, itty-bitty difference: people don’t live inside computers (as long as you don't live in a Disney fantasy franchise). Since people don't live there, the actual numbers for individual IP addresses can change every session. In fact, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) holds onto a bank of addresses and sends your computer a new one any time you log in.

Fancy.

Here's what a standard IP address looks like:

52.45.109.4

(You can actually copy this number directly into your address bar and get to a real site. We dare you to try it.)

Those might just look like some random numbers, but don’t tell them that. IP addresses have feelings, too… and make just as much sense as your home address (probably).

Each IP address is unique, which is what makes them so helpful for finding a specific website. Since the birth of the internet, IP addresses followed that structure of a four-part dotted decimal number. Behind the scenes, that number actually represents a 32-bit long binary number with four 8-bit sections (also known as bytes) called octets. All those octets help break down where you are by saying which network you're in, what specific sub-network you're part of, and then the actual, individual device that's hooked up.

Not bad for 32 bits.

Most IP addresses (like the ones your ISP assigns you) change between sessions. Because they change all the time, you can call them dynamic addresses. Changing addresses sounds well and good, but the story of the internet needs some static addresses too, or else no one would be able to find cool sites like Find the Invisible Cow. That's something out of a dystopian novel, right there.

Luckily, static addresses never change. Thanks to them, all the servers that make the internet work act more like servers and less like a dizzy two-year-old trying to hit a piñata four feet above their head.

Believe it or not, though, these IP addresses don't have enough space to handle all the world's internet devices. Because of their 32-bit structure, IPv4 (named because of the four octets) only gives you four billion unique IP addresses. Back in the 90s when these suckers were invented, that wasn’t such a big deal. Now we have SmartFridges, which means that we actually ran out of space a while ago.

And that's the story of how the internet ended forever people decided to make a new system called—wait for it—IPv6.

This new version of IP addressing uses 128 bits in eight 16-bit parts (which is called hexadecimal, by the way). IPv4 didn't immediately go away (obvi), but over the next few years the whole internet will transition over to IPv6, whose larger structure has enough room for 85 octillian times more addresses than we had in IPv4. (For future reference, one octillion is equal to a billion, billion, billion.)

To exceed that number, we'd need

• Smart Shoes
• Smart Shirts
• Smart Birthday Cards
• Smart Silly Bandz

and probably some other Smart items too.

Challenge accepted.

(Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5, Source 6, Source 7, Source 8, Source 9)