Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85
Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85
Dave Mills created NTP, the protocol that holds the temporal Internet together, in 1985.
Wtf is this headline? When this guy dies you put the GMT he died at in hours, minutes, seconds. Not "85". Respect.
ArsTechina is not what it once was sadly. Still one of the better news sites but that would have been something you would have seen 10 years ago
And to think we want to abolish leap seconds because they are ‘too hard’.
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.
We're already fucking it up. Facebook and Xitter exist.
On a more positive note, Facebook and XFormerlyKnowAsTwitter are not essential parts of the internet. You can choose to not use or care about them. It is much harder to not use NTP, and it's great that it is an open and comprehensible standard 👌
Shit. That thing is supposedly hard to understand.
Very. And he was going blind, too. I read a marvellous interview with him not too long ago, I'll see if I can find it.
Ah, here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time
Wow! What an interesting read about someone I've never heard of, but whose work has impacted daily life in so many ways. Its amazing how many systems rely on accurately telling time and the intricate solution that NTP is.
https://archive.is/2fw9A With no paywall. Thanks, what an interesting read!
Thank you for the link to the interview!
Hard to understand but at least there's multiple implementations other than ntpd, like Chrony and systemd-timesyncd.
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.
XXIst
I've been seeing this on Lemmy lately, why are people going to roman numerals? Do we hate Arabic now? It's not saving keystrokes unless I'm crazy?
Network time protocol protocol
ATM machine
Ass to mouth machine works!
PIN number
Network time protocol, man.
RAS Syndrome
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.
1194 in Australia, it was discontinued in 2019 after 66 years. It's now on the internet http://1194online.com/
TIL
POP-CORN
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.
Nah, not so much a failure on your part as a failure on the part of a society that elects to glorify people that "move ball good" or "say line funny" over the people that have built the pillars without which our modern society literally would not exist in the same manner.
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
What are you talking about?
Epoch is the only time that matters.
Non Token Puntable.
