3 Jan
2016
3 Jan
'16
9:32 p.m.
Packet Internet Groper sounds definitely like something Mills would come up, but I’m
pretty sure he was fitting words to make the existing word an acronym (by the way history
is full of these things like news, golf, posh, etc… are all alleged to be acronyms thought
here is no historical justification for any of this). As others have pointed out that
ping existed prior to Mills and the Fuzzballs for other protocols. If Mills was
promulgating that definition prior to 1982, that’s fine, but we hadn’t heard it and it was
not the etymology of the UNIX ping program. In fact, other than the fact that Louis
Mamakos was working on the Fuzzballs, we didn’t know much about them. Louis knew to call
me after he crashed our machine because I was the childhood friend of his officemate and
had been down to the UMCP computer center on countless occasions to visit.