[ih] A laugh and a question

[Jack Haverty]

Ian et al,

My organic archives are getting fuzzier every day, but my first memory
of the word "ping" applied to the Internet was at some meeting back in
the early 80s, probably an ICCB meeting (which later was renamed to be
called IAB).   Dave Mills was reporting on his group's experiments with
fuzzballs torturing the toddler Internet.   I was PI for the BBN
projects at the time which were implementing various TCPs and deploying
the "core" gateways.  Dave was herding a gaggle of fuzzballs which were
poking and prodding the neonatal Internet.   In fact, I think I remember
him characterizing it as a "big fuzzy pink thing" which you could poke
and prod and observe interesting behaviors, like turning green.
Wonderful imagery.

Anyway, Dave reported that the most useful tool was "pinging".  This was
before "the Unix implementation" which most people equate to the
Berkeley code.  I know because I wrote the first Unix TCP implementation
on a poor little PDP-11/40 based on Jim Mathis' LSI-11 code, and I
hadn't had the insight to write any ping program, and the Berkeley code
didn't exist yet.  We all had various ways of doing "ping" experiments -
e.g., create a packet in memory using DDT and call the packet-output
routine.

Dave used to perform the most interesting experiments and find new ways
to make our gateway code keel over.  Ping, source-routing, etc. were the
tools of the trade, but may not have yet been called by those names at
that time.  We could launch a new gateway software release into the dark
alleys of the Internet, and Dave's minions (his army of fuzzy ones)
would find it pretty quickly and test its mettle.

But I credit Dave with first applying the term "ping" to the Internet.
At least that's where I first recall hearing the term.

Much of this lore was unfortunately not contained in the RFCs, which
typically came much later and documented history.   The intense
"discussions" that I remember all happened on mailing lists, e.g., the
tcp-ip, internet-headers, header-people (email), etc. which were
maintained at ISI.  I wonder if those old email archives are still
around.  If so, they would be a fascinating insight into the maelstrom
that was the Internet's crucible.

By the way, does anyone remember what PING stood for?  Of course, at the
time everything was an acronym, and Dave had one for P.I.N.G.  

[My recollection of the answer in the next message to avoid spoiling the
fun....]

/Jack Haverty



On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 08:15 +1100, Ian Peter wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> If you are I need of a good laugh, you might like to explore the following
> site
>  
> http://ioih.org
> 
> Which explains the history of an industrial steam driven Internet. I
> particularly liked the depictation of little children called pings who were
> employed to travel up and down the steam driven pipes of the Internet to
> make sure they didn't rust up.(the name arising from the noise they made as
> the brushes cleaned the pipes).
> 
> But it did lead me to think - what was the origin of the word ping and its
> use in Internet? If anyone has some clues I'd be interested to hear.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> 
> Ian Peter
> www.nethistory.info
> 
> 
> 
>