Microsoft Network Monitor 1.0 (codenamed Bloodhound) was originally designed and developed by Raymond Patch, a transport protocol and network adapter device driver engineer on the Microsoft LAN Manager development team.
Netmon was conceived when the hardware analyzer was taken during a test to reproduce a networking bug, and the first Windows prototype was coded over the Christmas holiday.
The code was originally written for OS/2 and had no user interface; a symbol was placed in the device driver where the packet buffers were kept so received data could be dumped in hex from within the kernel debugger.
At the request of Microsoft IT, two simple identification features were added - a non-cryptographic password and an identification protocol named the Bloodhound-Oriented Network Entity (BONE) (created and named by Raymond Patch as a play on the codename Bloodhound).
Originally, versions of Network Monitor were only available through other Microsoft products, such as Systems Management Server (SMS).