1995
The PingER project has its origins in 1995 in the WAN Monitoring group at SLAC, which monitored links to many sites that SLAC collaborated with by using the IP Ping facility.
1996
In 2006, the ESnet Network Monitoring Task Force (NMTF) quickly become involved in the project and the work was extended to cover ESnet sites. Several DOE Labs installed the PingER monitoring software which greatly improved our knowledge of the network.
1997
In April 1997 the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) created the Network Task Force to cover the needs of the High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) community.
1998
In 1998, the Cross Industry Working Team (XIWT) adopted the PingER tools developed out of the above efforts and used them to monitor their member sites.
2001
In July 2001, there were 32 monitoring sites around the world, and over 3500 links were monitored.Towards the end of 2001 the number of sites monitored started dropping as sites blocked pings due to security concerns. The rate of blocking was such that, for example, out of 214 hosts that were pingable in July 2003, 33 (~15%) were no longer pingable in December 2003 even though they were still up and running (as measured by responding to TCP probes).
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We gave a SLAC-wide colloquium on The Emergence of the Internet and Africa.
Submitted paper on dynamic ping delay based Geolocation to ACM/IEEE, Started development of geolocation Visual traceroute.
Renan Sousa from UERJ in Brazil visited SLAC for 3 months and put up a prototype Linked Open Data access to PingER data for mashups.
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