Celebrating The 19th Anniversary of Nmap (phrack.org)

Long-time Slashdot reader collinl writes: Nmap was released 19 years ago on September 1... Seems like it has been around for ever. Was there a port scanner before Nmap?
Good question. Nmap first appeared in an article in Phrack magazine back in 1997 (which included its complete source code), although over the years its output options have expanded to include a humorous "script kiddie" format. And by 2007 the Nmap Scripting Engine was released, which in 2010 was used to generate a cool visualization showing the popularity of the top million favicons.

Comments

"Good question" answered in the article

[Anonymous Coward]

The article explains that nmap, by far, is not the first:

Prior to writing nmap, I spent a lot of time with other scanners exploring the Internet and various private networks (note the avoidance of the "intranet" buzzword). I have used many of the top scanners available today, including strobe by Julian Assange, netcat by *Hobbit*, stcp by Uriel Maimon, pscan by Pluvius, ident-scan by Dave Goldsmith, and the SATAN tcp/udp scanners by Wietse Venema. These are all excellent scanners! In fact, I ended up hacking most of them to support the best features of the others. Finally I decided to write a whole new scanner, rather than rely on hacked versions of a dozen different scanners in my /usr/local/sbin. While I wrote all the code, nmap uses a lot of good ideas from its predecessors. I also incorporated some new stuff like fragmentation scanning and options that were on my "wish list" for other scanners.