The Story of the Very First UNIX Ping Program Oct 4, 2007, 21 :45 UTC (5 Talkback[s]) (3950 reads)
"Yes, it’s true! I'm the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about. :-)
"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..."