25 years ago, I sent this email, which ended up changing the course of my life From: Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications To: gtk-list [at] redhat . com Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ethereal 0.2.0 Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:47:01 -0500 (CDT) Ethereal is a network analyzer that lets you capture and interactively browse the contents of Ethernet frames. Packet data can be read from a file, or live from a local network interface. More information, including the source distribution, can be found at http://ethereal.zing.org . Comments and patches are welcome. I remember being nervous and excited at the time, wondering what the reaction would be. I had spent the previous few months working on a protocol analyzer, which was something I needed at work.
There are a couple of things to note: the name wasn’t Wireshark (we changed the name in 2006) and at the time of this email, protocol analyzers were rare, you could even say a precious thing. Back then, if you wanted to see what was happening on your network, command line tools like tcpdump and snoop were available at no cost, but if you wanted a GUI analyzer, you had to pay for a product that might cost the equivalent of a luxury car.
Wow, 25 years! In 1998, dial up was the standard way to connect to the internet from Home, AOL 4.0 debuted, and it wouldn’t be another six years until the Firefox browser was released.
Don’t be afraid to start something new. You never know where it might take you 25 years from now.
