If you use the ping utility, and if you must know,

Ping is a little thousand-line hack written by Michael J. Muuss which practically everyone among the technical hoi polloi utilizes.

Michael John Muuss, Died on 20 November 2000 in a car accident, was knowledgeable about his subject and will be missed. He was always confounded at the popularity of his PING program, which he wrote in a surprisingly short time (overnight), and always said he would have spent more time on it had he known how popular it would become.

Mike Muuss coded up the PING program on an evening of December 1983, inspired by another engineer David L Mills. Dr Mills’ remarks during a meeting in Norway about his work on ‘Fuzzball LSI-11′ systems to measure path latency using timed ICMP Echo packets, instigated Mike to create ping.

Once when Mike encountered an awry campus network, he recalled Dr.Mills’ comments and quickly coded the first PING program (including kernel support for it on BSD UNIX). But the faulty network hardware was found and fixed before he could launch his first “ping” packet.

Berkeley Foundation eagerly took back his kernel modifications and the PING source code, and it’s been a standard part of Berkeley UNIX ever since. Since it was free, it has been ported to many systems since then.

In 1993, ten years after he wrote PING, the USENIX association presented Mike Muuss with Lifetime Achievement Award.

According to Mike Muuss, PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it’s a sonar analogy. However, he also said that he heard second-hand that David Mills offered this expansion of the name, so perhaps they’re both right.

Want to see the source code? Download it from my 4shared folder here: PING.shar