[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
I thought the phrase originally derived from the submarine service, where sailors would send out a sonar signal to ‘ping’ their target. Sort of like playing ‘gotcha’ with your fellow subs or other marine vessels while out on wargame maneuvers, or to annoy russian subs during the cold war.
[/QUOTE]
[Sean Connery in Hunt for Red October]
“Give me a ping Vasily. One ping only.”
[/SCIHFRO]
[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
I thought the phrase originally derived from the submarine service, where sailors would send out a sonar signal to ‘ping’ their target.
[/QUOTE]
Hey, I said that.
[QUOTE=Rysto]
Hey, I said that.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, yes you did. I missed that on my first reading because you opened your post with “it’s a computing term”. I should have slogged thru to the end.
PING may have been an acronym that stood for “Packet INternet Groper”, but, if so, that was probably a retro-transformation done later.
[QUOTE=Sunspace]
PING may have been an acronym that stood for “Packet INternet Groper”, but, if so, that was probably a retro-transformation done later.
[/QUOTE]
It is. From Wiki.
The possibly apocryphal story is that he was troubleshooting a bad cable and got sick of crawling back and forth from under the desk, so he whipped up a program that caused the terminal bell to sound every second when his computer was able to see another. He then crawled under the desk to start troubleshooting, and knew he had wriggled the bad cable when the bell stopped sounding.
ETA: the bell sounding part was someone else, the story from the man himself here
[QUOTE=capybara]
Jeeeeeez, it sounds like 1993 in here-- brilliant. When you could alter your profile to give a clever lyric from Psychic TV or something if someone dared ‘finger’ your account ,and you pinged your pal at Harvey Mudd to see whether you could ‘talk’ them. So much cheaper than the phone. S
Hey, Mac terminal still knows ping. . . and finger! And talk! Yay!
So “ping” went corporate? How. . . geeky.
[/QUOTE]
Darn, you beat me to “finger.”
I’m trying to fathom…no, I take that back. Freakin’ corporate drones!
(confessional)
I do tell my poker players that they have “flop lag” if I am just missing their hands.
But seriously! I’ve got geek cred!
(/confessional)
[QUOTE=gigi]
…“Could you ping him and just let him know about this decision?”…
[/QUOTE]
You could reply “Unable to resolve destination hostname”, or maybe “request timed out”.
You want Unix commands! **Here **are some Unix commands! 
who | grep -i blonde | talk; cd ~; wine; talk; touch;
unzip; touch; strip; gasp; finger; gasp; mount;
fsck; more; yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep
I’ll be impressed when middle-manager types start using “grep”.
“Who’s the account manager there?”
“Dunno, I’ll have to grep my records.”
[edit]Dang, Noone got in before me
I think when that term is used you should call and hang up on the person they asked you to ping. Tell them it took however many seconds to get a response, and the connection works.
[QUOTE=Noone Special]
You want Unix commands! **Here **are some Unix commands!
who | grep -i blonde | talk; cd ~; wine; talk; touch;
unzip; touch; strip; gasp; finger; gasp; mount;
fsck; more; yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep
[/QUOTE]
Hey! “clean” is an arbitrary filename parameter of “make” – that’s cheating! 
But it does give rise (heh) to the old Stupid Unix Trick:
% Got a light?
No match.
I’m already on the lookout for the next catch phrase.
I have high hopes for “computer says no”.
1999, eh? Well, we are up in the boonies but I really have only starting hearing this on our “team” during the past couple of months. Maybe it insidiously spread from the IT folks to the functional folks because they are starting to use it un-self-consciously. In most cases it seems to be “send him an e-mail” so I don’t know why that didn’t suffice.
These suggestions are intriguing…I might try the call and hang up on the guy who “pinged” my today with questions about a task that was due June 1. Thanks, guy. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
You could reply “Unable to resolve destination hostname”, or maybe “request timed out”.
[/QUOTE]
I’m so going to use this the next time someone asks me to ping somebody… 
I’m waiting for the business world to steal my favorite geek slang term, “frob”. Such a useful concept, too…“frob that button, will ya, Marge?”
I can’t help but think that the OP is mishearing the term in question. Is it likely that they are saying “PIN” in reference to the now ubiquitous Blackberry’s messaging service? Within my office the term “pinning” someone has come to be the universal term for sending a PIN, text or email via Blackberry.
It’s probably not a big stretch to believe that it got bastardized into “ping” in the OPs head, or perhaps it’s happened throughout the office.
Unless the OP is in a hardcore computer geek type office it seems really unlikely that the term “ping” is being used as a reference to any of the common coding and IT conventions mentioned here.
We’re implementing an Oracle system so the team is a mix of IT types and functional types, not many of whom use Blackberries. I am definitely hearing the pronunciation “ping” but I’m sure you’re right that the usage could have come from anywhere.
After being on this board awhile, I’m surprised I haven’t snuck “grok” into my everyday language. Although I wouldn’t be 100% sure I was using it correctly.
Not to defend a corporate catchphrase, but it seems like it might have a useful purpose as an all purpose term for contacting someone about an issue, without regard to the method of contact – whether it be by phone, e-mail, IM, fax, personal meeting or what not.
[QUOTE=Mindfield]
Hey! “clean” is an arbitrary filename parameter of “make” – that’s cheating!
But it does give rise (heh) to the old Stupid Unix Trick:
% Got a light?
No match.
[/QUOTE]
One that, unfortunately, got fixed in all newer *nix’s (*nices?) that I’m aware of…
% make love
Don’t know how to make love.
(in most cases they changed the message to something like “target ‘love’ not recognized” or something vanilla like that :()
[Bye! jack]