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In September 2007, the new Network General was acquired by NetScout Systems for $205M.
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That same year, Network Associates readopted its founder’s name and became McAfee Inc. In mid-2004, Network Associates sold off the Sniffer technology business to investors led by Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group for $275M in cash, creating a new Network General Corporation. It was subsequently acquired by Symantec in 2010. In 2002, much of the PGP product line was sold to the newly formed PGP Corporation for an undisclosed amount. Saal and Shustek left the company shortly thereafter. (“PGP”), the encryption company founded in 1991 by Phil Zimmerman, for $35M in cash. Weeks later, Network Associates bought Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. In December 1997 Network General merged with McAfee Associates (MCAF) to form Network Associates, in a stock swap deal valued at $1.3B. It had almost 1000 employees and was selling about 1000 Sniffers a month. īy 1995 Network General had sold Sniffer-related products totaling $631M at an average gross margin of 77%. Their product was a network monitor called LAN Patrol, which was enhanced, rebranded, and sold by Network General as WatchDog. In December 1989, Network General bought Legend Software, a one-person company in New Jersey that had been founded by Dan Hansen. On August 3, 1989, they sold an additional 1,270,000 shares in a secondary offering, and on Apan additional 2,715,000 shares in a third offering. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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