The Story of the Very First UNIX Ping Program

“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…”

Complete
Story