Mike Muuss

Author of the freeware network tool Ping.

A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University he was a senior scientist at the US Army Research Lab in Maryland when he died, specialising in geometric modelling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital networks. He wrote a number of software packages (including BRL-CAD[?]) and network tools but the thousand-line Ping, written in December 1983 while working at the Ballistics Research Lab[?], is the one he is remembered for.

Due to its usefulness Ping was quickly hard written into a large number of apps, initially BSD Unix, but later OSes including Windows.

The Usenix Association gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1993.