Of course I knew that the IP for our web site was 204.251.80.243, and so http://204.251.80.243 was a valid way of referring to the page, but where did the 3439022323 come from?

The 204.251.80.243 IP number is composed of four groups of decimal digits, separated by dots, in what is called a "dotted quad" representation, where each number (separated by the dots) can range from 0 to 255 (and therefore there are 256 different values) and if you compute (((((204 * 256) + 251) * 256) + 80) * 256) + 243 = 3439022323

I discovered this little bit of useless information reading several articles by Karen Kenworthy (Winmag.com's Power Tools author):

• http://www.winmag.com/columns/powertools/2000/15.htm
• http://www.winmag.com/columns/powertools/2000/16.htm
• http://www.winmag.com/columns/powertools/2000/17.htm

If you really want to follow up on this, you can read RFC1738, the official standards document definition of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc1738.html

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