While discussing the structure of an IPv4 address, I mentioned that a bit can have a value of 0 or a value of 1. This sums up binary in a simplified nutshell. Using only the numbers 0 and 1, we can make any number we like, and in this section, I'm going to show you how to do this. But first, let me show how I learned decimal at school (back in the 1970s) and then we can apply these principles to binary.
Where binary can only use the numbers 0 and 1, decimal uses the numbers 0-9 to make up any value. When I was at school, my teacher drew a chart on the blackboard that looked a little like this:
| Thousands | Hundreds | Tens | Ones |
If she wanted to show the number 1, she would write the following:
| Thousands | Hundreds |
