The Story of the 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. :-)
I named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the whole principle of echo-location. In college I'd done a lot of modeling of sonar and radar systems, so the "Cyberspace" analogy seemed very apt. It's exactly the same paradigm applied to a new problem domain: ping uses timed IP/ICMP ECHO_REQUEST and ECHO_REPLY packets to probe the "distance" to the target machine..."

More for techies and hackers, it's a brief but informative look on how PING came to be. It even has the source code of the original program.

And no, Ping is not a videogame. You're thinking of Pong.

(via The Mortuary Portal)