Ping The World

Googled” is an IT term that has come to be used commonly now. Another word like this is “Pinged”. It is common to see this phrase these days: “I pinged you yesterday but could not reach you”. But do you know the origins of this phrase are not even from the IT field?

The word ‘ping’ dates back to early naval battles during the many wars in the early 20th century when submarines first located enemy ships using SONAR technology and the transmissions would make a bright pinging noise back.

That ‘ping’ sound from SONAR has now turned into an expression for sending a computer message from one server to another.

If you did not know already, there is something called the ‘ping’ command that works well on Windows, macOS and Linux / Unix systems and has similar uses.

I personally use it in its most basic or simple format to check whether my internet connection is working or not. It is actually quite a handy tool. On Windows or Linux, the command to be used is “ping www.google.com" to be run from the command prompt or terminal.

What happens when you type this command is that a message is sent to the Google server and the server sends a response back to the calling system. The time for this back-and-forth dialogue is also recorded (eg: time = 100 ms means it took 100 milliseconds to talk with the server). The lower the time the better the connection is.

If you see either of these messages (or something similar), that means your internet connection is not working.

ping: cannot resolve google.com: Unknown host

(or)

Request timeout for icmp_seq 23

ping: sendto: No route to host

So, the next time you have a doubt about your internet connection working, fire up the command prompt (on Windows) or the terminal (macOS or Linux) and check it with “ping www.google.com". Go ahead, ping the world!

We will cover “ping” in more detail at a later time, including some of its nefarious uses