TIL the network utility "Ping" was written by a single person in an evening in 1983, and he named it after the sound a submarine sonar makes because it uses the exact same echo principle.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(networking_utility)

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/LessBar4057 on 2026-06-19 10:34:18+00:00.

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Comments in Today I Learned@lemmy.world

digging through man pages makes you realize that most of the stuff that makes the modern internet consists of one-man projects glued together.

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It’s also when the scope of those projects could be accomplished by one person.

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Even if projects could be solo efforts, it’s probably better to avoid the bus factor.

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Even worse than bus factor, it’s really easy to compromise when no one double checks your work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

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What’s your BGB Plan? (Big Green Bus, I guess you could alter for the colour of buses in your city)

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The original idea behind Unix was to have small tools doing very specific task and do it will.

Then you could use shell to combine them together to do more advanced stuff.

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Maybe we should go back to the roots and start doing things well, instead of just glueing more and more together. Maybe even start with hardware and kernels made for desktop use.

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And many of those one men were Dave Plummer

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I love it when the TILs read like “I discovered my toes and they’re called toes”.

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Vasili. One ping only.

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Deleted by author

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This review was so good I had to see if it was a real book! It is: The story about Ping.

Bravo, the world needs more reviews like this.

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It was also backronym’d to mean Packet Internet Groper, but I get why not a lot of people would want to embrace that

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I’ve never heard that before and I was better for it.

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Well it goes along with the ethos of other commands suck as touch, finger, mount,…

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time to grope me some internet real quick. Just grabbing those packets and going all in

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When my cousin learned about Ping at school in the 2000s he setup ping gateway -t on all the computers in his highschool class.

Took down the school network for the day. He didn’t get in trouble I think. Just a laugh from the school admin (they knew each other and he volunteered there). Admin blocked ping after that.

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What was the rate of packets sent? Modern ping is typically setuided and has a limit of 1 per second if you’re not root.

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I believe it was multiple threads…

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I was in HS from 2001 to 2005, and it was the wild west. They had computer money galore, but the guys tasked with being in charge of them knew as much as we did, and they just could not compete with the teenage ingenuity. I remember using telnet to just shoot the shit with people all day, and eventually play MUDs in class. And trying to destroy the computer or the network from the inside was just a daily occurrence.

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Man they really need to check for loops in the network, that sounds like a feedback loop. Although my experience only goes back to like 2012 so it might have been a older hardware thing

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I mean a easier and sinister solution would be to unplug two computers and patch the two ports together. Broadcast storm.

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Ah that’s the term I forgot, had a nasty one 2014 before I repatched all the servers. Took the office network out for a few hours before I fixed it

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That person was Mike Muuss, who tragically died in a car crash in 2000, only 42 years old.

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Is the response back called a “pong”?

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I believe it’s technically called an “echo response”, but “pong” is a very common unofficial name for it.

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Echo reply, or response, depends where you look

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That name was already taken in the software world ;)

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I could have written it, too.

But today it has a lot more features.

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I learned about pings in college, because apparently my torrent client was constantly sending them, but the university network did not allow pings and they sent an email threatening to shut off my internet if I didn’t stop pinging.

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First thing you do to debug connectivity to a remote host problem is the ol’ ping.

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This reminded me of a funny story in a party years ago. There was a Mac playing music on YouTube but after a couple of minutes the connection were lost and the music stop until someone clicked on something and the connection wake up and the music continue for a couple of more minutes just to go down again. I asked if I could try to fix it and the first thing I did was a ping, the first couple of packages got lost but then it connected and the music continued. Every couple of minutes some packages got lost but then it back again and the music didn’t had any more problems for the night. The host of the party was all over me thanking me for saving the party and other people were asking me if I was a hacker or something.

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Ping?

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In a cli type “ping 8.8.8.8”

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command not found: in

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I’m surprised your system doesn’t have that command, why is that?

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The joke is that they wrote the entire comment on the terminal, and the command ‘in’ from ‘in a terminal’ doesn’t exist

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Fun fact, most military ships and submarines use fmcw sonar, that doesn’t really ping in the same way.

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Fuck My Concurrent Walrus?

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yes. they use the slapping sound of someone on board fucking walruses as the ping sound

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I thought it was called that because of pingpong where you shoot a ball and the other person shoots it back.

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At work we say “i pung it”

Because pinged doesn’t sound right. And pung is more fun.

Another one we haven’t named yet is when an address goes through translation. Is it NATted? “Its been NATted”

Doesn’t feel right.

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Oh so ’NUT’ is not work appropriate language? Take it up with the author of NAT and with linguists

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you’ll need to do better than this. maybe you’ll stumble on the right term in a moment of post-NAT clarity.

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If i was from london then saying Nutted would sound like i was saying natted so that brings a whole new layer to this.

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horrible ping latency though

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Doesn’t AngryIP Scanner send out zillions of em? Why is networking still so primitive?

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The simpler the better for basic infrastructure. Though TCP was never really good for what it’s used for.

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