Mike Muuss
Michael John Muuss was the American author of the freeware network tool ping.Career
A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist specializing in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks at the United States Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland when he died. He wrote a number of software packages and network tools and contributed to many others.
However, the thousand-line ping, which he wrote in December 1983 while working at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, is the program for which he is most remembered. Due to its usefulness, ping has been implemented on a large number of operating systems, initially BSD and Unix, but later others including Windows and Mac OS X.
In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Muuss, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.
Muuss is mentioned in two books, The Cuckoo's Egg and Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, for his role in tracking down crackers. He also is mentioned in Peter Salus's A Quarter Century of UNIX.
Muuss died in an automobile collision on Interstate 95 on November 20, 2000. The Michael J. Muuss Research Award, set up by friends and family of Muuss, memorializes him at Johns Hopkins University.
