25 years ago, I sent this email, which ended up changing the course of my life 

From: Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications 
To: gtk-list [at] redhat . com
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ethereal 0.2.0
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:47:01 -0500 (CDT)

Ethereal is a network analyzer that lets you capture and interactively
browse the contents of Ethernet frames.  Packet data can be read from a
file, or live from a local network interface.

More information, including the source distribution, can be found at
http://ethereal.zing.org . 

Comments and patches are welcome.

I remember being nervous and excited at the time, wondering what the reaction would be. I had spent the previous few months working on a protocol analyzer, which was something I needed at work.

There are a couple of things to note: the name wasn’t Wireshark (we changed the name in 2006) and at the time of this email, protocol analyzers were rare, you could even say a precious thing. Back then, if you wanted to see what was happening on your network, command line tools like tcpdump and snoop were available at no cost, but if you wanted a GUI analyzer, you had to pay for a product that might cost the equivalent of a luxury car. I needed an analyzer to do my job, so I ended up writing a simple one and releasing it as open source.

As it turned out, other people needed an analyzer too. A couple of days after I sent this email, I received a patch. Then another, and another. This quickly blossomed into a thriving developer community which has kept me busy ever since. In the intervening years, the