What does the slash mean in an IP address?
In: 53
To explain this, we must first consider Jeri Ryan’s character on Star Trek: Voyager. She was called Seven, or more properly, Seven of Nine. Seven was her individual designation, and the “of Nine” part indicates that she was part of a pod which contained nine total Borg.
So if she wished to communicate with one of the other Borg in her pod, she just sent her message directly to them. “Hello, Five.” “Good morning, Seven, how are you?”
But if she wanted to communicate with another Borg, that was not part of her pod, she had to go through the Borg Collective, and have it route her message to the recipient’s pod, which then got the message to the individual Borg.
The “of Nine” part was necessary because it helped her know if a message could be sent directly to its destination, or if it had to be routed though the collective. If she’d been “Seven of Twenty-Eight” then she’d have had a lot more Borg she could communicate with directly.
In IP addresses, the / is like the word “of” in her name. It lets you know that the individual designation part of this name is over, and subsequent information is regarding the size of your computer’s pod. Of course, we make it far more complicated than it has to be. The number after the / isn’t just the number of computers that your computer can talk to- the bigger the number, the smaller the pod. If it’s “24” then there are 256 addresses in your local pod. If it’s “25” then there are 128. If it’s “23” then there are 512. Each time the number after the / goes down or up, the number of addresses in the local pod doubles or halves.
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