On Februthe company, which had 29 employees at the time, raised $22M with a public stock offering of 1,900,000 shares on NASDAQ as NETG. Financing was initially provided only by the founders until an investment of $2M by TA Associates in December 1987. The product line gradually expanded to include the Distributed Sniffer System for multiple remote network segments, the Expert Sniffer for advanced problem diagnosis, and the Watchdog for simple network monitoring.īetween inception and the end of 1988, Network General sold $13.7M worth of Sniffers and associated services. Protocol interpreters were written for about 100 network protocols at various levels of the protocol stack, and customers were given the ability to write their own interpreters. In April 1987 the company released an Ethernet version of the Sniffer, and in October, versions for ARCNET, StarLAN, and IBM PC Network Broadband.

The company had four employees at the end of that year. They then reengineered TART for IBM’s Token Ring network hardware, created a different user interface with software written in C, and began selling it as The Sniffer™ in December 1986. When Nestar was acquired by Digital Switch Corporation (now DSC Communications) of Plano, Texas in 1986, Saal and Shustek received the rights to TART.Īt Network General, Saal and Shustek initially sold TART as the “R-4903 ARCNET Line Analyzer (‘The Sniffer’)”. It used custom hardware, and software for an IBM PC written in a combination of BASIC and 8086 assembly code. In 1982 engineers John Rowlands and Chris Reed at Nestar’s UK subsidiary Zynar Ltd developed an ARCNET promiscuous packet receiver and analyzer called TART (“Transmit and Receive Totaliser”) for use as an internal engineering test tool. The inspiration was an internal test tool that had been developed within Nestar Systems, a personal computer networking company founded in October 1978 by Saal and Shustek along with Jim Hinds and Nick Fortis. The Sniffer was the first product of Network General Corporation, founded on by Harry Saal and Len Shustek to develop and market network protocol analyzers.

Cnet wireshark packet capture utility