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

Network Time Protocol is one of the many critical systems that we never really think about on the Internet. When you sit down at your computer and see that the time is exactly right, you are benefiting from Network Time Protocol (NTP).

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

I have a fondness for NTP. For reasons I have no recollection about at some point in my Unix journey I had to compile NTP from source. I also had to figure out how to configure it and read about the different "stratums" of time servers. The fact that there were this series of computers around the world that were directly attached to atomic clocks and providing Stratum 0 time was really cool. And then to see how NTP analyzed your computers clock, and determined it’s "drift" over time so that it could self-correct was mind blowing.

Add on top of this that Mills went blind due to glaucoma and had to transition the software to another maintainer. I don't know if he ever made a dollar off of NTP, but it is an amazing show of the impact that one person, focused on a topic, can have.

Thank you David Mills. 🙏