History
The term "fuzz" or "fuzzing" originates from a 1988 class project at the University of Wisconsin, taught by Professor Barton Miller. The assignment was titled "Operating System Utility Program Reliability - The Fuzz Generator". The project developed a basic command-line fuzzer to test the reliability of Unix programs by bombarding them with random data until they crashed. The test was repeated in 1995, expanded to include testing of GUI-based tools (X Window), network protocols, and system library APIs. Follow-on work included testing command- and GUI-based applications on both Windows and MacOS X.
One of the earliest examples of fuzzing dates from before 1983. "The Monkey" was a Macintosh application developed by Steve Capps prior to 1983. It used journaling hooks to feed random events into Mac programs, and was used to test for bugs in MacPaint.
Another early fuzz testing tool was crashme, first released in 1991, which was intended to test the robustness of Unix and Unix-like operating systems by executing random machine instructions.
Read more about this topic: Fuzz Testing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)