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. The Sniffer was the antecedent of several generations of network protocol analyzers, of which the current most popular is Wireshark. According to SEC 10-K filings and corporate annual reports, between 1986 and March 1997 about $933M worth of Sniffers and related products and services had been sold as tools for network managers and developers. By 1994 the Sniffer had become the market leader in high-end protocol analyzers. The Sniffer was a computer network packet and protocol analyzer developed and first sold in 1986 by Network General Corporation of Mountain View, CA. Network packet and protocol analyzer Sniffer

Network sniffer tools