The 85-year-old of the NTP protocol, which maintains time on billions of devices, passes away

The 85-year-old of the NTP protocol, which maintains time on billions of devices, passes away

 

The protocol that binds the temporal Internet together was developed in 1985 by Dave Mills.

 

The creator of Network Time Protocol (NTP), Dr. David L. Mills, passed away peacefully on January 17, 2024, at the age of 85, according to a statement released by Internet pioneer Vint Cerf on Thursday. After Mills' daughter Leigh notified Cerf of David's passing, the news was posted on the Internet Society mailing list.

"He was such an iconic element of the early Internet," Cerf said to solve a significant issue in the online world—the synchronization of time across various computer systems and networks—Dr. Mills developed the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in 1985.

 

A reliable and consistent timekeeping system is essential in today's digital world, as computers and servers are dispersed over the globe and have internal clocks.

 

The solution is provided by NTP, which enables networked computers' clocks to synchronize with a single source of time. Everything, from network security to data integrity, depends on this synchronization. For instance, NTP guarantees precise and synchronized timestamps for logging and tracking network activity, as well as correct timestamps for financial transactions on the network.

 

When Mills was working at COMSAT and contributing to ARPANET (the early Internet) in the 1970s, he became aware of the necessity of synchronized time across computer networks for the first time. Computers were aligned by his solution to within tens of milliseconds.

 

According to a great 2022 New Yorker feature by Nate Hopper, Mills had a lot of difficulties keeping up with and developing the protocol, particularly as the Internet got bigger and more complicated. His efforts brought attention to the important but frequently overlooked open-source of open-source software developers—a subject that a 2020 XKCD comic handled pretty well. Mills developed glaucoma from birth, gradually lost his vision, and passed away. In the 2000s, Mills gave Harlan Stenn command of the protocol because of vision problems.

 

Along with his work on NTP, Mills also created the first FTP implementation, influenced the development of "ping," and played a significant role in Internet architecture as the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force. The "Fuzzball router" was created for NSFNET and is one of the earliest examples of a modern router, based on the DEC PDP-11 computer.

 

As a result of his contributions to network protocols and timekeeping in the creation of the Internet, Mills was widely acknowledged for his work, winning the IEEE Internet Award in 2013 and being elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2002.

 

The University of Mich Ph.D. awarded Mills a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences in 1971. Mills had been an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware at the time of his death. He retired from teaching there in 2008 after 22 years of service.