A Web address is given in what is known as 'dotted-decimal.' Amazon's IP address of 72.21.211.176 translates to 01001000.00010101.11010011.10110000 in binary, or base 2. Without a lot of discussions, the largest decimal number you can get with eight binary digits is 255. The smallest is 0. That's a total of 256 possible numbers, zero through 255. Now, imagine this: You have two shirts and three pairs of jeans; How many different clothing ensembles can you create without duplication? The number is six, or two times three. Now, with four sets of 256 possibilities each, how many different IP addresses can you make, without duplication? The answer is 4,294,967,296, or a little over four billion. Now, that's a lot of IP addresses, which was plenty when the Internet started. However, we now have more systems than IP addresses. The older Internet protocol is IPv4; the newer is IPv6. Since the new and the old are not compatible, translation hardware and software need to be implemented to make them work together. That cost is huge. The old possible number of addresses is 2 raised to the power (exponent) of 32, which is the number above. The number of possible IPv6 addresses is 2 raised to the power of 128. Try that in your calculator!
What level of mathematical expertise do you think would be required to function as an Internet website maintenance technician as a discussion question?
