Appendix C: A Brief History of Ethereal

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Overview

In late 1997, Gerald Combs needed a tool for tracking down networking problems and wanted to learn more about networking, so he started writing Ethereal as a way to solve both problems.

Ethereal was initially released, after several pauses in development, in July 1998 as version 0.2.0. Within days, patches, bug reports, and words of encouragement started arriving; Ethereal was on its way to success. Not long after that, Gilbert Ramirez saw its potential and contributed a low-level dissector to it.

In October 1998, Guy Harris of NetApp was looking for something better than TCPview, so he started applying patches and contributing dissectors to Ethereal.

In late 1998, Richard Sharpe, who was giving TCP/IP courses, saw its potential on such courses, started looking at it to see whether Ethereal supported the protocols he needed. While it didn’t at that point, new protocols could be easily added. As a result, he began contributing dissectors and contributing patches.

The list of people who have contributed to Ethereal is long, and almost all of them started off with a protocol that they needed, but that Ethereal did not already handle. These contributors copied an existing dissector and contributed the code back to the team. A complete list of the people who have contributed is available from Ethereal’s website.

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