Internet Protocol (IPs)
Consider you want to send a birthday gift to your friend on their birthday, where will you send it? To their street address right?
Same is the case here. The early computer scientists wanted to identify computers on the internet with a unique number, something like a telephone numbers today. So, they came up with the concept of TCP/IP.
An IP of a computer device is the address of that device in a computer network. Technically, it is a 32-bit number used which identifies devices in a network. All the communication to and fro from the device in that network will be done in terms of its IP address.
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Consider that you are uploading a file to any site or say to Google drive.
Talking at the lowest level of network communication, your file is converted to packets and each packet has the destination node address with it which is nothing but the IP address.
On a higher level, IP addresses are classified into two types:
IPv4: IPv4 addresses are 32 bits (four bytes) as explained in the definition. An example of the IPv4 address would be 104.244.42.129 which is the IPv4 address of twitter.com. They are stable to use and hence are used today to identify machines in the world.
IPv6: IPv6 addresses are pretty new to the world and are basically eight hexadecimal numbers separated by “:”. An example of IPv6 address would be 2001:0cb8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. They are unstable and hence not used widely yet. The web is still using IPv4 due to its stability and there is no estimate when we will start to use IPv6 since it is not stable for now.