I never really thought the day would arrive, but today I actually saw some use of understanding a little bit about binary understanding and how it has an influence on things. Of course, it is useful to know that computers communicate with 0s and 1s, but today as I watched a video about subnet masks, I actually needed to have some understanding of the binary system in order to understand the theory behind the subnet masks and how they are structured.
Have you ever seen a subnet mask? It will often look like 255.255.255.0. Well, that is cool, but do you really have any clue what those numbers are all about? They are actually splitting your address into what is the so-called network address and what is the host address. In other words, they influence how much of the address is a part of the outside and bigger network, and what is influenced by your host. If you are in a home network, you will often see 255.255.255.0 as the subnet mask, but if you work at a big ISP or some other tech giant, you might see subnet masks such as 255.255.0.0 or maybe even 255.0.0.0.
But, what do these numbers show? Well, when you see 255.255.255.0, it means that the first three octets are enabled, which again means that those are part of the network address. The rest, which remain 0, are those part of the host network.
You might not get this entirely, but I at least felt good getting some understanding and use of learning about the binary system as I studied more about subnet masks today.