Mike Muuss, Ping author
Mike Muuss, author of an indispensable software program called Ping ("a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening"), died in November in a car crash in New Jersey, according to a report on the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list.
Beloved to network administrators around the world, Ping was originally a utility that worked with the BSD version of Unix created at Berkeley, but is now an essential part of almost every operating system. Functionally, it is the simplest of tools-it sends a single packet of information to an Internet address to see if that address is reachable. As a debugger of Internet connections, Ping was/is invaluable.
Ping was so useful that the term quickly became a part of geek jargon. To "ping" a person meant to contact that person via any means. "Ping me again tomorrow if you don't hear from me about your question," one hacker might say to another.
"If I'd known then that it would be my most famous accomplishment in life, I might have worked on it another day or two and added some more options," Muus wrote on a Web page devoted to the topic.
Muuss was born in 1958, received a degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and worked at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. He wrote Ping in December, 1983, and "named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the whole principle of echo-location."
Victor Grinich, Engineer
Victor Grinich, one of the "traitorous eight" who left Shockley Semiconductor and founded Fairchild Semiconduictor in 1957, died in Mountain View in November. He was 75.
Grinich was born Victor Grgurinovich to Croatian immigrant parents, and studied electrical engineering at the University of Washington and Stanford.
He went to work for William Shockley, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor at Bell Labs. Shockley's difficult managerial style led Grinich and the others (including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, later to found Intel) to leave the company and sign a contract with Fairchild Camera to create Fairchild Semiconductor. The founders all received stock options, at the time an unheard-of arrangement.
While Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments was creating the first integrated circuit, made of germanium, one of the eight, Jean Hoerni, was perfecting the planar process, which allowed Fairchild to make integrated circuits from silicon, and give birth to a new industry.
After leaving Fairchild, Grinich taught at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He wrote a textbook, Introduction to Integrated Circuits, published in 1975.
Dr. Louis Néel, Physicist
Dr. Louis Néel, one of France's most distinguished physicists and a Nobel laureate for his discoveries about magnetic fields, died in France in November at the age of 95.
Dr. Néel discovered that a ferromagnetic material like iron loses its magnetism when heated and that other materials, not normally magnetic, behave like iron at higher temperatures. He then discovered the "Néel patterns" of magnetism in general, which helped electronic engineers develop the minuscule particles used to store information magnetically in a computer's memory, leading to greatly enhanced computer memory units.
The Nobel academy said Dr. Néel's research was important in "telegraphy and telephony, in radio and television, and in general for low-loss equipment in high-frequency applications."
Dr. Néel shared the 1970 Nobel Prize with a Swedish astrophysicist who was honored for work on the interactions between plasmas and magnetic fields.
