Marionnet was born in April 2005 as a simple textual interface to Netkit, written in OCaml by Jean-Vincent Loddo at the Paris 13 University for his own networking course.

The code has since been completely rewritten and redesigned in September 2005, in order to remove the dependency from Netkit and to ease the construction of a graphical interface, partly built on DOT.

The architecture was further extended and the system made more general when Luca Saiu joined the project in 2007, contributing in particular to the dynamic reconfiguration aspects.

The main concern is disk usage but that largely depends on the distribution of choice; pinocchio is the custom distro that was developed to meet average needs.

The main goal of Marionnet is the teaching of computers networks in university laboratories,[8] although it could be a valuable tool also for high schools.