Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85

On Thursday, Web pioneer Vint Cerf announced that Dr. David L. Mills, the inventor of Network Time Protocol (NTP), died peacefully at age 85 on January 17, 2024. The announcement got here in a publish on the Web Society mailing record after Cerf was knowledgeable of David’s dying by Mills’ daughter, Leigh.

“He was such an iconic factor of the early Web,” wrote Cerf.

Dr. Mills created the Community Time Protocol (NTP) in 1985 to handle an important problem within the on-line world: the synchronization of time throughout totally different laptop programs and networks. In a digital surroundings the place computer systems and servers are situated everywhere in the world, every with its personal inside clock, there is a vital want for a standardized and correct timekeeping system.

NTP supplies the answer by permitting clocks of computer systems over a community to synchronize to a typical time supply. This synchronization is important for the whole lot from information integrity to community safety. For instance, NTP retains community monetary transaction timestamps correct, and it ensures correct and synchronized timestamps for logging and monitoring community actions.

Within the Nineteen Seventies, throughout his tenure at COMSAT and involvement with ARPANET (the precursor to the Web), Mills first recognized the necessity for synchronized time throughout laptop networks. His answer aligned computer systems to inside tens of milliseconds. NTP now operates on billions of devices worldwide, coordinating time throughout each continent, and has grow to be a cornerstone of contemporary digital infrastructure.

As detailed in a superb 2022 New Yorker profile by Nate Hopper, Mills confronted vital challenges in sustaining and evolving the protocol, particularly because the Web grew in scale and complexity. His work highlighted the usually under-appreciated position of key open supply software program builders (a subject explored fairly effectively in a 2020 xkcd comic). Mills was born with glaucoma and misplaced his sight, finally changing into utterly blind. As a consequence of difficulties along with his sight, Mills turned over management of the protocol to Harlan Stenn within the 2000s.

Other than his work on NTP, Mills additionally invented the primary “Fuzzball router” for NSFNET (one of many first trendy routers, based mostly on the DEC PDP-11 laptop), created one of many first implementations of FTP, impressed the creation of “ping,” and performed a key position in Web structure as the primary chairman of the Web Structure Job Power.

Mills was well known for his work, changing into a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2002, in addition to receiving the IEEE Internet Award in 2013 for contributions to community protocols and timekeeping within the improvement of the Web.

Mills acquired his PhD in Pc and Communication Sciences from the College of Michigan in 1971. On the time of his dying, Mills was an emeritus professor at College of Delaware, having retired in 2008 after educating there for 22 years.