A senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research Lab in Maryland, Muuss specialized in geometric modeling, virtual reality, networking, and Multiple Instruction-stream, Multiple Data-stream (MIMD) architectures.
But he is better known to Internet admins as the author of the “ping” network utility. Ping allows users to quickly see if servers are “alive” (online), and how long it took to reach them, to check the health of both the server and the network path to get there. Muuss was killed in a multi-vehicle car crash on November 20. He was 42.