Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] Need some words from you ...
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> now that I have the structural parts of docbook behaving for me so I can
> produce a document, I need some content.
>
> Could those who have developed a dissector tell me a little about how you
> came upon Ethereal, and what motivated you to start working on Ethereal?
My earliest notes on Ethereal date back to September of 1997. I was
working at a local ISP and occasionally used snoop and tcpdump to
troubleshoot problems. I wanted to learn more about various networking
protocols, and I needed a better tool for tracking down problems.
Writing Ethereal seemed like the right way to address both issues, and
to give something back to the free software community.
My notes gathered dust for a few months until I started working on it
in earnest in May or June of '98. After a few fits and starts I had a
version that could read from a live interface or a capture file and
display basic ethernet, ARP, IP, TCP, and UDP packets. After the
initial web site was created, I announced version 0.2.0 on July 15th.
The next day bug reports, patches, and words of encourgement started
coming in (and they haven't stopped). After adding a few mailing lists
and a CVS server to the site, the project took on a life of its own.
