The Story of the PING Program

My original impetus for writing PING for 4.2a BSD UNIX came from an offhand remark in July 1983 by Dr. Dave Mills while we were attending a DARPA meeting in Norway, in which he described some work that he had done on his “Fuzzball” LSI-11 systems to measure path latency using timed ICMP Echo packets

Ping has been a very useful utility over the years and I was fascinated to read its history.