Friday, January 21, 2005

The Story of the PING Utility

Ping is a 1000 line utility written in 1983 by the late Mike Muuss (pronounced “moose”). He was working at the US Army’s Ballistics Research Lab and experienced network connection difficulties. PING was written in response to those difficulties. He is quoted as saying, “If I’d known it was going to be my legacy, I’d have built more functionality into it.”

Contrary to popular belief, PING is not an acronym for anything. It simply stands for “ping” which is based on Navy SONAR, which in turn is based on bat and porpoise navigation.

Ping works by sending an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) signal to a remote host and waiting for a reply.

Read more about ping at Mike Muuss’ website. Unfortunately, Mike was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000. Learn more about ping and other troubleshooting tools in any of our seminars and workshops for IT professionals.

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