The Fping story

I created Fping in 1998 because I was frustrated with the ping application that comes with windows. I wanted to ping more than once a second, so I created a basic ping application that could do this. It didn't have many options at that time. Basically the only thing it did was sending ICMP 'echo request' packets and wait for the response. I had to give it a name and went with Fping (fast ping). How original.

Turns out it wasn't original at all. There was (and still is) an open source Fping application available with very similar goals. Oops. I swear I didn't know about it until it was too late. I was adding options to my Fping application and the program was spreading on the net. It first dawned on me when I got a 'bug report' with an option that didn't work like the open source program did.

So the name of my ping application was bad. Very bad. But the program was also successful, spreading fast, and I didn't want to change it at that time because of this. Also, my Fping is not simply a copy of the open source version. Some features are the same and some features are unique (for both). I will keep it this way, cause it seems the best thing to do.

In all those years the maintainers of the open source version never contacted me. I can only hope the name confusion didn't cause frustration. My sincere apologies.