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Imagine you have a store and your inventory is sorted away into various bins in different rooms. Each bin can be identified by a combination of the room number and the bin number, for example Room 10 Bin 182.
Now, lets assume you want to avoid having to write “Room” and “Bin” every time you want to identify a location so you come up with a simple standard where the first 2 digits of a number represent the room and the last 4 digits represent the bin, so the above example would just be: 100182. This system gives you up to 99 rooms with up to 9999 bins in each room, that should be plenty right?
Now let’s imagine you open another store that uses the same 6-digit identifier system but you need more than 99 rooms. You can shift the point where the number gets split into 3-digits for the room and 3-digits for the bin instead to account for this alternative arrangement. You get many more rooms, but each room has many fewer bins in it.
Each system works fine for each store individually, but say you need to comunicate between stores without getting confused. You need a way to include not only the location of the item but also how many digits make up the room portion of the number. One way to do that would be to include that after the number, for example 100182/2. That tells the reader the location is 100182 where the first 2 digits are the room number giving room 10 bin 0182.
This dynamic grouping is what the subnet mask in a computer network does. It tells the computer how many digits (bits) in the number (IP address) represent the room (network-address) and how many represent the bin (a specific device within the network).
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