The inventor of the NTP protocol which allows you to know the time on billions of devices has died at 85

On Thursday, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf announced that Dr. David L. Mills, the inventor of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), died peacefully at the age of 85 on January 17, 2024. The announcement was posted in a message to the Internet Society mailing list after Cerf was informed of David’s death by Mills’ daughter, Leigh.

“He was an iconic part of the early Internet,” Cerf wrote.

Dr. Mills created the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in 1985 to address a critical challenge in the online world: synchronizing time across different computer systems and networks. In a digital environment where computers and servers are located all over the world, each with its own internal clock, there is a significant need for a standardized and accurate timekeeping system.

NTP provides the solution by allowing the clocks of computers on a network to synchronize to a common time source. This synchronization is vital for everything from data integrity to network security. For example, NTP maintains timestamps of network financial transactions accurately and ensures accurate and synchronized timestamps for logging and monitoring network activities.

In the 1970s, during his tenure at COMSAT and his involvement with ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet), Mills first identified the need for time synchronization in computer networks. His solution aligned the computers within tens of milliseconds. NTP now runs on billions of devices around the world, coordinating time across continents, and has become the cornerstone of modern digital infrastructure.

As detailed in an excellent 2022 New Yorker profile by Nate Hopper, Mills faced significant challenges maintaining and evolving the protocol, especially as the Internet grew in scale and complexity. His work has highlighted the often underappreciated role of leading open source software developers (a topic explored quite well in a 2020 xkcd comic). Mills was born with glaucoma and lost his sight, eventually going completely blind. Due to vision problems, Mills handed control of the protocol to Harlan Stenn in the 2000s.

Besides his work on NTP, Mills also invented the first “Fuzzball router” for NSFNET (one of the first modern routers, based on the DEC PDP-11 computer), created one of the first implementations of FTP, inspired the creation of “ping”, and played a key role in Internet architecture as the first chair of the Internet Architecture Task Force.

Mills has been widely recognized for his work, becoming a member of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2002, and receiving the IEEE Internet Award in 2013 for his contributions to network protocols and timing in development. of the Internet.

Mills received his doctorate in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971. At the time of his death, Mills was professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, having retired in 2008 after teaching there for 22 years old.