Why the Command 'ping' Is Called Ping
Mike Muuss wrote it in one evening in 1983 and named it after what submarine sonar does.
On the evening of December 20, 1983, Mike Muuss sat down at a terminal in the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory and wrote a small C program. A colleague, Dave Mills, had mentioned he was seeing strange network behavior from a router; Muuss wanted a tool that could prove whether a specific host was reachable at all.
He called it ping. The name came from sonar. An active sonar pulse goes out as a sharp tone — the classic movie "ping" — and the operator listens for the echo. Distance is the round trip divided by two. The network tool does exactly the same thing: send an ICMP Echo Request, wait for the Echo Reply, print the round-trip time.
Muuss wrote the first version in about a thousand lines of C in one evening. He later wrote that he chose the name partly as a joke and partly because the operating model really was sonar-identical — a short pulse to verify presence and measure latency.
The program shipped with 4.3BSD in 1986 and has been on essentially every network-capable operating system ever since. Muuss died in a car accident in 2000. His original source file is still in the FreeBSD tree, comments and all.
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