Invention of traceroute

Traceroute is a computer network tool that shows the route that data packets take across the internet from one machine to another and measures the delays along the way. It was written in 1987 by Van Jacobson, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, based on an idea suggested by Steve Deering. The program sends packets with a time-to-live value that increases by one each time, and every router that discards the packet when the value reaches zero replies with an error message, so that the sender can build a list of the routers along the path. Network engineers use the tool to find where connections are slow or broken. The Windows version is called tracert.

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