On Tue, Oct 13, 2026 at 12:24 PM Gerald Combs via Wireshark-dev
<wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> For those of us who remember the original, DOS-based Network General Sniffer™️ or are otherwise curious about computing history, its source code is now available at
>
> https://dpiconsortium.org/sniffer-protocol-analyzer/
>
> In case you aren't familiar with the Sniffer, it pretty much defined and dominated the network protocol analysis industry at the time.
This will be interesting to tinker with. I suspect many people on
this list are too young to imagine a time that Ethereal/Wireshark
didn't completely dominate the space. But yeah, back in the day
network analyzers were *VERY* expensive ($10k+), often complete
hardware solutions rather than just another app running on your
desktop, and supported a limit subset of popular protocols.
Ethereal changed all that practically overnight.
Devin
--
Devin Heitmueller, Senior Software Engineer
LTN Global Communications
o: +1 (301) 363-1001
w: https://ltnglobal.com e: devin.heitmueller@xxxxxxxxxxxxx