Amusingly, the ping of death was somewhat a result of all the other UNIX ping tools that silently truncated the ICMP packet to the “standard” size, even when to

Amusingly, the ping of death was somewhat a result of all the other UNIX ping tools that silently truncated the ICMP packet to the “standard” size, even when told to use a larger size. It was Windows ping that actually honored the packet size option, which allowed the larger ping packets to be sent. Im pretty sure that many UNIX systems were also affected by it, as they had never been exposed to larger ping packet either. I don’t know if there are good sources explaining this, but I remember it when it happened.