[Leroy S. Mort]

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.

[posterchild]

Thanks for the origin link. Didn't know Windows has it. Except for brief periods of Windows use and VMS sys admin work, I've spent nearly all of my computing life in unix.

[Gondring]

I laugh every time I go back to that Story of Ping page and read the review... :-) I figured someone would post it to this thread and I just HAD to go read it again! Thanks!