What does the slash mean in an IP address?

Question

What does the slash mean in an IP address?

In: 53

Answer 1

None of these are very 5 year old friendly…

Imagine that everything before the slash is your apartment number, and the number after the slash is how many apartments are in the building. Think of a building with 10 apartments, you’re number 4, so you write 4/10.

This is useful because when you need to find unit 11, you know that it’s not in your building and you’ll need to go outside.

Obviously this is very simplified, for starters the smaller the number after the slash, the bigger your local network is. But you get the idea. Any IP within your local network can be reached directly, and any IP outside of that has to be reached via a router (which is a device that joins multiple networks together).