Mike Muuss
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Michael John Muuss (October 16, 1958 - November 20, 2000) was author of the freeware network tool Ping.
A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research Lab in Maryland when he died, specialising in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks. He wrote a number of software packages (including BRL-CAD) and network tools (including TTCP and the concept of the default route or "default gateway") and contributed to many others (including BIND [1]).
However, the thousand-line Ping, written in December 1983 while working at the Ballistics Research Lab, is the one for which he is most remembered. Due to its usefulness, Ping has been implemented on a large number of operating systems, initially BSD Unix, but later others including Windows.
In 1993, The Usenix Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) 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 was mentioned in two books, The Cuckoo's Egg (ISBN 0-7434-1146-3) and Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (ISBN 0-684-81862-0), for his role in tracking down crackers. He also is mentioned in Peter Salus's "A Quarter Century of UNIX".
Muuss died in a car crash on US route I-95 on November 20, 2000. The Michael J. Muuss Research Fellowship, set up by friends and family of Muuss, memorializes him at Johns Hopkins University[2].
