You'd have a difficult time locating a particular address in a large city using only a general description of the house in question. In the same way, a computer's operating system (OS) would have problems finding a data file for you if all you know is what's in it.
Back in the day, when secondary storage was small, it was relatively easy to find files on a floppy disk or hard disk. Connecting to another PC over a peer-to-peer network was straightforward and didn't require much in the way of an address—just the internal address of a parallel port.
However, on today's network and storage technologies, with their immensity, addressing on all levels is an essential part of computing.
In this chapter, we look at the variety of addressing schemes used in computing and networking—their structures, representations, and purposes. We also...