192.168.0.1

Just as someone needs your mailing address if they want to send you a letter, your computer needs what’s called an Internet Protocol (IP) address to send and receive messages across the internet. This IP address is a unique string of numbers, in a specific pattern, separated by periods. One common one is 192.168.0.1, baffling many everyday internet users.

Back in 1996, two groups, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, had to pick a handful of addresses for use in closed networks, not public ones. One was 192.168.0.1. The form is called “dot-decimal,” meaning 192.168.0.1 is a decimal conversion of 11000000.10101000 in binary code, with all those 1s and 0s corresponding to the size of the address (i.e., how many individual addresses it can support). The first digits, 192.168, identify the computer network address while the last two digits signify the actual computer (“host“) address. For in-the-weeds reasons, the last two digits vary (eg., 0.0 or 1.0), so sometimes 192.168.0.1 is referred to as 192.168.x.y.

So … what does all this mean? This part is pretty simple. Typing in 192.168.0.1 is an easy way to access the administrative functions of your router, the device that connects your computer to the internet. This is useful if you need to troubleshoot a network problem, or, say, change the password of your router.