The Story of Ping

What is the ping tool, what is it used for, and where did it come from? We learn about the man who first created ping, why it's not an acronym for anything, and why gamers care about it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio.
He there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio,
and how the Tech Are you? You know, there's a
good chance you've heard the Term Ping before. If you're

(00:27):
a golfer, you probably associated with equipment like clubs and bags,
but that's not what I'm talking about today. If you're
a submariner, well, your concept of paying is closer to
what I'll be talking about in this episode, and specifically
in this episode, I'm talking about Ping as a way
to judge network speed between two different machines. Now, with

(00:51):
some stuff that you know we use in our technical world,
the history can be a little muddled or hidden. Right.
Might be one of those things where we have some
common tool that we all use, but no one really
documented where that tool came from or who first came
up with it, and so we have to use a

(01:12):
lot of qualifiers to talk about it. But in this
case we can point to a specific person as the
originator of the paying function, at least the first paying function,
and that person was Mike Muss sadly, must passed away
in two thousand in a car accident. So uh, that

(01:35):
is really a tragedy. must seemed like a really entertaining
and innovative guy, based upon the stuff I've read that
he wrote. Must had studied sonar and radar while he
was in college. He had been modeling those systems and
he worked for a while at the Ballistic Research Laboratory,

(01:56):
or B R L, which we also have to talk
about in the past tense. The army established the army
research laboratory in Nineteen two. That would absorb the old brl.
So the B R L is no more. It is
part of the A R L. Anyway, while must was
working at the B R l, he noticed something hinky

(02:18):
seemed to be going on with the I P network
within that organization. Now, this was in nineteen eighty three
and at that point, I think you're most folks had
never even heard of internet protocol, or I p. that's
what I p means in this case, not intellectual property,
but Internet Protocol. I Doun't that most people had ever

(02:40):
heard of that back in nineteen three. I know I
had never heard it. The concept of the Internet was
a pretty foreign one to anyone not working in a
military organization, a research institute or a number of universities
that we're doing pioneering work in the field. Computer networking
in general was something that was a pretty foreign concept

(03:03):
to folks. This was early on when people could actually
get access to a personal computer, let alone the thought
of how do I connect this computer to that computer?
So it would take a decade before the rest of
US would start to understand that you could actually connect
computers together and make a network and then create networks
together to create a massive interconnected system, a k a

(03:26):
the Internet. But must was really familiar with computer networks.
He worked on the IP network at Brl all the time,
and so when he knows things weren't quite behaving the
way they usually should, he decided to find out what
was going on and to do that he needed a
diagnostic tool. That didn't exist, so he had to create

(03:48):
a program to do it. Now he had heard about
other methods of testing things like network speed between machines
that used other methodologies, but those weren't really applicable to
his network. So he had to make the tool from
scratch and he programmed it on a UNIX system. This

(04:09):
is a family of operating systems that computer science scientists
at the Bell Labs Research Center of a t and
t created back in the nineteen sixties uh and then
ended up releasing it for others to use in the
nineteen seventies. So your average person would likely find vanilla
UNIX to be intimidating, because it is a system that

(04:33):
programmers made for other programmers for the purposes of being
able to create programs within this framework and then used
on those machines or similar machines. It is not a
particularly user friendly operating system, at least not if you're
someone who's unused to command prompts as opposed to graphical

(04:54):
user interfaces or Gooey's Um. Back in the day, when
I first started using muters, command prompts were the way
to go. In fact, I remember being incredibly reluctant to
move from the DOSS system that was in use on
IBM compatibles back in the day to migrating to Windows,

(05:15):
because I thought windows was a huge waste of resources,
that your computer had to use so many resources just
to run the operating system that it completely hindered the
sort of programs you could run on that sort of computer,
and I did not like the idea of moving from
doss to Windows. These days, if you put me in
front of a line prompt kind of of operating system,

(05:38):
I'm sure I would be completely lost. UH, as I
get older, it gets harder to navigate those kinds of things. Anyway,
what must wanted to do was create a small program
that could measure the quote unquote, distance between two different machines.
Except we're not really talking about physical distance here, although

(06:00):
that can be a factor and we'll get to it. Instead,
what we're really talking about is the amount of time
it takes for one machine to send a message to
a second machine and then receive a message from that
second machine. So how long does it take you to
send a message out and get a reply back? In
that way, it's a lot like an echo. So an

(06:22):
echo is when you make or you hear a sound
and then you hear that sound repeated. And it happens
when sound waves bounce off of some hard, smooth surface,
and the smoother and harder the surface, the better it
is for creating echoes. So let's say that you are
in a canyon, maybe it's a box canyon, and you

(06:44):
got a red base on one end and a blue
Basse on the other, and no one can explain why.
So you're in this box canyon and you decide to
shout text stuff, rules or you know something that you
would actually shout. Well, the echoes you would hear are
actually the sound waves that you generated that came from you.
Those air fluctuations originated from you and then they bounced

(07:08):
back to you after they hit the canyon walls. So
if you're in a place where there are no hard,
smooth surfaces, you're not going to get an echo. Doesn't
matter how loudly you scream. There are no surfaces for
the sound to bounce off of and come back to you.
It's just gonna travel outward until it's essentially too weak

(07:28):
for it to be heard by at least human ears. Now,
when we talk about stuff like sonar, we're talking about
using sound to get an idea about how far away
objects are from the sonar mechanism. And if we break
down what sonar is from a technical standpoint, essentially what

(07:50):
you have is a speaker that emits the sound and
a microphone that picks up echoes of the sound and
then some word of the system to calculate the amount
of time between making a sound and getting the echo.
These systems could be human powered or it could be
modern systems use computers, but in the old days it

(08:12):
could actually be someone with a stopwatch and very quickly
reacting in order to get an idea of how long
it took to send a sound out and to get
the echo back. This is really useful if, for example,
you're in a submarine that doesn't have windows. Those submarines
don't because windows are a point of failure and you

(08:34):
don't want those when you're in a metal tube that
goes under the water. So you use the sonar to
beam out a sound and you know how fast sound
travels through water. It's a standard sort of thing. It
actually travels faster through water than it does through air.
We typically say that sound travels at about three forty
three per second through the air, but in water it's

(08:57):
one thousand four hundred eight meters per second. So if
you send out a sound in a specific direction and
you time how long it takes for the sound to
come back to you and then you essentially divided by two,
you know how far away you are from, say, and
underwater cliff face. It's pretty common to call the sonar

(09:18):
sound a Ping, because that's what it sounds like. If
you've seen the film adaptation of the hunt for Red October,
you know there's a scene in which sean connery, who's
playing a Soviet Submarine Commander, tells his Sonar Operator reverify
our range to target one ping only. Now, in that
case he's using the Ping to secretly communicate with the Americans,

(09:42):
but he's selling his sonar operator the reason is just
to make sure they know exactly how far the Americans
are in case they need to fire upon them anyway.
That's why must called his tool a ping. It was
using a similar sort of approach. A message goes out
from on computer to a different computer and the message

(10:03):
essentially says hey, send us back to me, and the
target computer follows instructions and sends the message back. The
amount of time between sending the message and receiving the
reply can give you an idea about the network speed
between those two machines. If it's slower than expected, something's
going wrong. Maybe there's too much traffic on the network,

(10:23):
maybe there is an actual switch that's down somewhere on
the network and it necessitates traffic to route around the issue.
So it's really a diagnostic tool for measuring path latency.
We'll talk more about latency in just a second, but
first let's take a quick break. All right, let's talk

(10:52):
about latency. You can think of latency as the delay
between the cause of something and it's effect. I always
use video game examples for this, because anyone who has
played enough video games has experienced this at one point
or another. Um and it's, you know, one of the
contexts in which we really talk about paying. Anyway, in

(11:13):
most video games you really want the game to respond instantly,
or at least appear to be instant according to our
limitations of perception when you work the controls. So when
you push that jump button, you want that lousy little
plumber to jump and squash that Gumba Gush. Darn it
when there's a delay. So you push the jump button

(11:34):
but the plumber waits a second before jumping. It makes
the game way more difficult to play. Some Games do
the so on purpose. Sometimes it's up to the player
to try and learn and adjust to the timing of
the game, and it was all part of the design.
Other Games didn't do it on purpose. They're just poorly made.

(11:54):
Or they're running on inadequate machines, and so there's this
latency introduced in to the experience and there's a lag
between input and output. Now must decide to create his
ping tool back in nine three on a whim. He
didn't intend for it to be some sort of glorified
feature that would be put to use countless times afterwards.

(12:16):
He just thought it was an interesting exercise. He described
the Ping Program as a quote, thousand line hack end quote,
and he wrote it in a single evening and he
says that if he had known how much it was
going to be used moving forward, he might have spent
a little more time and effort in designing it. He
also mentions that, of course, in Classic Uh fate, by

(12:42):
the time he finished designing the tool, the original issue
that made him think about it in the first place
had already been fixed. Someone else had gone into the network,
discovered it and fixed the problem. But the tools usefulness
obviously went beyond the single use case that inspired must
to create it. Must also joked about how people tried

(13:03):
to interpret Ping, the word paying, P I N G,
as an acronym. There was a common assumption in the
network Admin field that Ping stood for packet Internet grouper,
but must dismiss that right away. It was pretty common
to create wacky acronyms and government projects. In fact, that's

(13:23):
still true to this day. If you look at any
law or bill that has like a cool or cool
ish name associated with it, there's a good chance that
name is said to represent a tortured acronym, and I
am positive that in the overall majority of cases lawmakers

(13:44):
come up with a name for the legislation. First they
come up with their cool name and then, retroactively they
try to justify the name by creating a phrase for
which the name is supposedly an acronym, and it's almost
always terrible anyway. must say that's what people were trying
to do with paying, but he was adamant pain justed

(14:05):
for paying, like with Sonar. Now, if you're an online Gamer,
you're likely very aware of the importance of paying. With
online multiplayer games, each player is connecting to a game
server and to be clear, multiplayer games have lots of servers. Right.
Each game has tons of servers, and it's just that

(14:25):
a player logs into a single server into which lots
of other players are also logged, and once a server
reaches capacity, players will have to connect to other servers. Well,
it's pretty common practice to try and log into servers
that are geographically close to the player, because that helps
cut back on latency. Now, it's not always true that

(14:47):
the closest server provides the fastest data speeds between the
client machine, in other words the Gamer's rig, and the
server itself, but it's usually the case. If you log
into a server that's halfway across the world from you,
that means the messages coming from your machine and going
to your machine have to travel halfway across the world

(15:09):
and while data moves very, very fast, it's not instantaneous,
so you start to encounter a bit of latency. That
latency or lag means there is a delay between when
a Gamer does something in their game on their machine
and when the server finds out about it, and sometimes
that lag is enough to cause problems in gameplay. In fact,

(15:32):
the LAG does not have to be very long for
issues to pop up. Well, less than a second in fact.
I'll give you an example. So let's say you and
I are playing in a one on one first person
shooter game. It's me versus you, and you've got me
in your sights. You're clear across the map. You've spotted me.
You've got a sniper rifle, so you take aim at

(15:53):
me and you shoot from your perspective. You've got a
clear shot. There's no way you can miss. But then
there's the latency. Let's say my connection is lagging just
a bit, that I've got a very high ping rate
to the game server and in fact, while you appear
to be aiming straight at me, because from your side

(16:14):
the game server thinks that is where I'm at, on
my side I was doing the old Serpentinam and the
server gets my input commands and the game essentially decides
that your shots don't connect because it turns out I
wasn't really in the spot where you were aiming the
whole time. There are some gamers who use this kind

(16:34):
of thing to cheat at Games. So back in the
early days of Halo, to Multiplayer, there was a tactic
called stand by. A lot of modems had a standby
feature that would let you temporarily pause a connection to
a server. So it's like disconnecting, but it was just
doing it for a moment. so by using it strategically Halo,

(16:58):
two players could appear to be in one place in
the game because the game server couldn't verify where the
player was and so would just essentially keep the player
on the course that they were on before the connection severed,
but it would hold off on dropping the player entirely
in case the connection repaired itself. And so that meant

(17:21):
that if other players were trying to do damage to
that character, nothing would happen and once the connection reestablished,
the game would reconcile the players actual position. So to
someone else it would look like your opponent had gone
invincible for a few seconds and then would suddenly teleport
to a different location. And this got to be a

(17:42):
real problem because people were using it to get an
unfair advantage over others. But generally these days players do
not want a High Ping rate. It makes playing the
game very difficult and if you're a really competitive player,
like you're in the elite echelons, you really want to
minimize all the external factors that could make a game harder.

(18:03):
You want things to be a nice level playing field
for everyone. So it really is skill versus skill, maybe
some luck thrown in, but it's not some external factor
that you have no control over. Giving one party and
advantage over the other. So you really want that Ping
to be low, and by low I'm talking about milliseconds.

(18:24):
Competitive gamers really want a super low ping, like if
you managed to log into a server and you find
out that Your Ping rate is fifteen milliseconds or less,
that would be amazing. It would also mean you're probably
living like a mile away from the game server and
you're connecting straight to it. A Ping between fifteen and

(18:46):
forty five milliseconds is really good and it's not ideal,
but it's not enough of a delay to measurably impact
the game. Between forty five and one hundred milliseconds, you
start to get into an area where the lag can
be noticeable. Not necessarily a game breaking mechanic, but you

(19:06):
can start to notice little issues. Between one hundred and
two hundred fifty milliseconds, you've gotten experience that can make
a game unplayable, and beyond two fifty you might as
well just disconnect and try a different server. But it
also depends on what type of game you're playing. Right
not all games are equal. If you're playing a turn
based game, that's not nearly as sensitive to paying issues,

(19:28):
like if one player gets to go and then the
other player gets to go and you're not simultaneously battling
um at every moment, then a little delay is not
going to be a big problem. It might make the
game play a little irritating, but it's still totally playable.
But if you're talking about a twitch based first person
shooter style game, Players Need Really Low Ping for the

(19:51):
game to run smoothly, particularly if you're talking about those
elite levels of play. As an example of how this
can give one player an edge over or another, imagine
a scenario in which two players are about to come
into view of each other. Both of them are going
to have line of sight to the other players, so
like they're both cresting a hill or something. But let's

(20:13):
say player one's Ping is much lower than player two's Ping.
That means player one has much less path latency to
the game server. That could mean that player one will
be able to see player to a moment earlier, which
can give player one an advantage in the encounter. If
you've got two players of similar skill, that could push

(20:35):
a fair fight into unfair territory. All right, we're gonna
take another quick break. When we come back we'll wrap
up this discussion about paying. Okay, so now we understand

(20:56):
that ping is a way to measure the latency between
a client machine and a server machine. You could also
do it between servers. You know, it's it's really between
any two machines that are connected on a network. But
what Affects Ping? What makes ping go from low to high? Well,
as I mentioned earlier, physical distance between the client and

(21:18):
the server is one thing that can certainly affect Ping.
The further your information needs to travel to get to
a server and then return to get to you, the
more latency you're going to encounter. That just makes sense, right.
So if you're in the United States then you're connecting
to game servers that are located in Europe, chances are

(21:39):
Your Ping is going to be on the higher side
compared to Europeans who are connecting to that same server.
The other big factor is the amount of traffic that's
on your personal network. Just like with roadways, more traffic
leads to congestion and it slows things down. So if
you want to jump into war zone while you're house

(22:00):
made is busy downloading a ton of four K films,
chances are you're paying is going to suffer because your
network bandwidth is finite. It's a limited resource. There's only
so much of it and if the game is having
to fight for some of that bandwidth compared to the
downloading of these massive files, that means you're paying is

(22:20):
probably going to go up as a result. For that reason,
there are a lot of pro gamers out there who
will have to dedicated network connections, one just for their
gaming and the other for everything else, which to me
is crazy. But everything about pro gaming is crazy to
me because I'm a casual Gamer right I can't imagine

(22:41):
dedicating eight hours or more per day to playing, streaming,
you know, cutting together videos of my gameplay. That just is.
It's daunting to me anyway. Other things that can affect
paying can include the type of connection that you're using.
If you've got a hardwired connection, they go straight from

(23:03):
your computer to your router. That is going to Minimize
Ping on your end, at least as far as connectivity
between router and machine goes. Uh, if your housemaid is
still downloading the complete works of the fairly brothers, you're
still gonna have issues with paying. If if you're sharing
a network connection, if you're relying on Wifi. Then things

(23:26):
like your distance between your computer and the Wifi router
or the fact that there may be walls or ceilings
or floors between you and the router. All of that
can have an effect on paying. So general rule is
you want to be closer to the router rather than
further away, and if you can have a hardwired connection

(23:48):
it's better. Again, these really have more of an impact
at the higher levels of Gameplay. If you're a casual player,
it can still be something that might you might notice,
but it's not likely to have as critical and impact
on your level of play. It's also possible for there
to be issues beyond your own network that you have

(24:11):
no control over. So perhaps your Internet service providers network
is having an issue, or a network that your I
s P connects to Um that might have an issue
and there's not much you can do about that other
than maybe you can try and switch to a different
server to see if the routing between you and that

(24:33):
server is better. But if it's a problem with your
I s P, if it's between like if it's in
that last mile, there's really nothing you can do because
everything is funneling through that last mile connection to your
home and you can't step around that, at least not
without somehow magically switching to a different I s p. obviously,

(24:55):
if you are reliant on something like satellite networking, then
that's going to introduce enormous paying. In fact, with satellite
connectivity really aren't going to be able to compete in
things like first person shooters because of the latency between messages.

(25:16):
I mean these satellites are in outer space, so it
does take a little bit longer for the data to
get between you and the satellite then if you were using,
you know, fiber optic cable, for example, and that can
be enough to make it impossible for you to play
the very fast paced twitch based games. You can still

(25:37):
play things like, uh, turn based Games, maybe even mmos
that kind of thing. But yeah, for the stuff that's
reliant on a very fast connection, uh, you really wouldn't
be able to to manage that. Anyway, that's the story
of paying. Maybe someday I'll do the story of Pong.

(25:57):
That was a terrible joke. Also, I have kind of
covered the story upon when I talked about the history
of Arcade Games. So it was a terrible dad joke
and it was moot so I apologize to each and
every one of you, but I hope you enjoyed this episode.
This look at what Ping is, where it came from,
why it has that name and what it means Um
just the one thing to keep in mind is that

(26:20):
you want the number to be low. The higher the number,
the greater the latency between you and the machine when
you do speed tests on your device, like if you've
ever wondered if there's an issue with your network and
you're you know, maybe things are taking a long time
to download or you're getting a lot of buffering and
streaming video and you do a speed test, it's essentially

(26:42):
a ping. Is What's going on. It's it's although there
are more involved speed tests that actually have a they
maintain a connection in order to get essentially an average
of network throughput, how how much data is being able
to pass between your computer and the network over a

(27:04):
given amount of time. But it's an extension of this
paying concept. Al Right, if you have suggestions for topics
I should tackle in future episodes of tech stuff, please
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(27:24):
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(27:46):
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