This is it. The original pioneers of the net are starting to leave us. I hope we can take care of their baby as well as they did.

Shit. That thing is supposedly hard to understand.

To paraphrase Churchill "Never was so much owed by so many to a single man", NTP has been a critical aspect of XXIst century, from making highly complex clusterized systems work reliably to saving you the pain of adjusting the clock in your smartphone. If you have used even a single networked electronic device for a millisecond in your life, you owe the man some thanks.

Network time protocol protocol

I guess....it was his time

I always really liked that NTP uses port 123 which is the same number that you can dial, in the uk, on a analogue, landline phone, to call an automated service that tells you the precise time.

I wasn’t aware of him until now and, given the impact of his work on the world, that seems like a real failure in my part.

And could we please all remember the age of these folks and people like Vint Cerf when some fool drags out that old canard about old people not understanding new technology. No, only lazy or stupid old people don’t understand technology they didn’t grow up with. There’s just lots of them. And unless you are open minded and put in the effort, then you could end up fitting the stereotype because many of us are not as smart as we think

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Thursday, Internet 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 came in a post on the Internet Society mailing list after Cerf was informed of David's death by Mills' daughter, Leigh.

In a digital environment where computers and servers are located all over the world, each with its own internal clock, there's a significant need for a standardized and accurate timekeeping system.

In the 1970s, during his tenure at COMSAT and involvement with ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet), Mills first identified the need for synchronized time across computer networks.

As detailed in an excellent 2022 New Yorker profile by Nate Hopper, Mills faced significant challenges in maintaining and evolving the protocol, especially as the Internet grew in scale and complexity.

His work highlighted the often under-appreciated role of key open source software developers (a topic explored quite well in a 2020 xkcd comic).

The original article contains 471 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

His time has come.

All these people built something amazing that billionaires destroyed because they're bored of space. The internet was fun while it lasted