Michael John Muuss was born on October 16, 1958, and passed away on November 20, 2000. He was an American computer scientist who developed the free software called ping, which helps check computer networks. He also created the first interactive ray tracing program, a tool used to generate detailed images by simulating how light interacts with objects.

Career

Michael J. Muuss graduated from Johns Hopkins University. He worked as a scientist who focused on geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures, and computer networks at the United States Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, when he died. He created several software programs, including BRL-CAD, and network tools, such as ttcp and the idea of the default route or "default gateway." He also worked on other projects, including BIND.

The thousand-line ping, which he developed in December 1983 while working at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, is the program he is most known for. Because it was useful, ping was used on many different operating systems, first on BSD and Unix, and later on others, including Windows and Mac OS X.

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. This award honored 180 people, including Muuss, for their work on the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

Muuss is mentioned in two books, The Cuckoo's Egg (ISBN 0-7434-1146-3) and Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (ISBN 0-684-81862-0), for his role in helping to find people who broke into computer systems. He is also mentioned in Peter Salus's A Quarter Century of UNIX, and a link to his website’s ping page is included in How Linux Works (ISBN 1718500408).

Muuss died in an automobile collision on Interstate 95 on November 20, 2000. The Michael J. Muuss Research Award, created by friends and family, honors his memory at Johns Hopkins University.