Those of us doing packet capture in the early days, knew what today we call Wireshark to be The Ethereal Network Analyzer – originally released in mid 1998. That was it’s original name. Ethereal was renamed to Wireshark in 2006 if I recall correctly.
Here is what it looked like:
This 1st screenshot was before the button menu existed, and the display filter was at the bottom. In this screen shot, the capture is in progress:
Back then we just walked through the packets one by one!!!
Everyone who saw the program was amazed that this glass bottom boat to view the traffic on the wire even existed, and being able to see the packets and the dissection of their contents was out of this world.
It was, and still is – genius!
Here is a different view of a similar revision, but this one was a little newer, with the capture having been stopped. This one was on Windows:
Below we see a bigger menu system, the menu buttons have appeared, and the filter at the top plus packet colorization. Note the Expression filter creation appears, and a filter history is available. The Analyze menu item appears, as well as the Statistics. It’s not clear to me whether these two screen shotes are similar versions or whether the one with packet colorization was newer. I can’t remember.
Nevertheless, It is kinda cool to look back, and when you see Wireshark today, you can just tell how much work has done into making better, more powerful, and more customizable.
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