To: Petronski
As for its origin, I can only suspect it is from "Hunt for Red October," when Ryan is communicating with Ramius via morse code and tells Ramius to reply with a sonar ping:
I believe the term does originate with submarine pings, but its common internet use predates Hunt for Red October (1990) and is a unix command. If you have Mac OS, Linux, or any flavor of unix, issue a command line; ping www.freerepublic.com and you will get a report on network connectivity between your node and that of freerepublic.
63 posted on
07/02/2006 8:18:07 AM PDT by
posterchild
(The beer flowed like wine.)
To: posterchild
I believe the term does originate with submarine pings, but its common internet use predates Hunt for Red October (1990) and is a unix command. If you have Mac OS, Linux, or any flavor of unix, issue a command line; ping www.freerepublic.com and you will get a report on network connectivity between your node and that of freerepublic. The usage as a computer term supposedly dates from 1983
The "ping" command prompt also works in DOS and all flavors of Windows.
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