From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   David L. Mills, Who Kept the Internet Running on Time, Dies at 85   
   By Clay Risen, Jan. 26, 2024, New York Times   
   David L. Mills, an internet pioneer who developed and, for decades,   
   implemented the timekeeping protocol used by financial markets, power grids,   
   satellites and billions of computers to make sure they run simultaneously,   
   earning him a reputation as the    
   internet’s “Father Time,” died on Jan. 17 at his home in Newark, Del. He   
   was 85.   
      
   His daughter, Leigh Schnitzler, confirmed the death.   
      
   Dr. Mills was among the inner circle of computer scientists who from the '60s   
   through the ’90s developed Arpanet, a relatively small network of linked   
   computers located at academic and research institutions, and then its   
   globe-spanning successor, the    
   internet.   
      
   It was challenging enough to develop the hardware and software needed to   
   connect even a small number of computers. But Dr. Mills and his colleagues   
   recognized that they also had to create the protocols necessary to make sure   
   the devices could communicate    
   accurately.   
      
   His focus was time. Every machine has its own internal clock, but a network of   
   devices would need to operate simultaneously, down to the fraction of a   
   millisecond. His answer, first implemented in 1985, was the network time   
   protocol.   
      
   The protocol relies on a stratified hierarchy of devices. At the bottom are   
   everyday servers. These regularly ping upward to a smaller number of more   
   powerful servers, which in turn ping upward again, all the way to another   
   small number of powerful    
   servers linked to an array of timekeeping devices like atomic clocks.   
      
   Based on a consensus time drawn from these core devices, the “official”   
   time then flows back down the hierarchy. Nestled within the system are   
   algorithms that seek out errors and correct them, down to a tenth of a   
   millisecond.   
      
   The process is highly complicated for several reasons: Data moves at different   
   speeds across different types of cables; computers operate faster or slower;   
   and packets of data can get held temporarily along the way at routers, known   
   as store-and-forward    
   switches — all of which required a degree of programming sophistication on   
   Dr. Mills’s part that astonished even other internet pioneers.   
      
   “I was always amazed at the fact that he could actually get highly   
   synchronized time out of this store-and-forward system with variable delays   
   and everything else,” Vint Cerf, who helped develop some of the earliest   
   protocols for Arpanet and is now a    
   vice president at Google, said in a phone interview. “But that’s because I   
   didn’t fully appreciate the Einsteinian computations that were being done.”   
      
   Dr. Mills, who was a professor at the University of Delaware for much of his   
   career, not only published but also regularly updated the protocol over the   
   next two decades — making him the internet’s semiofficial timekeeper,   
   though he called himself an    
   “internet grease monkey.”   
      
   The network time protocol was only one of Dr. Mills’s contributions to the   
   underlying architecture of the internet. He created the fourth version of the   
   internet protocol, essentially its basic playbook, in 1978; it is still the   
   dominant version in use    
   today.   
      
   He also created the first modern network router, in the late 1970s, which   
   provided the backbone of NSFnet, a successor to Arpanet that evolved into the   
   modern internet. A fan of quirky names, he called the routers “fuzzballs.”   
      
   “It was a sandbox,” he said in a 2004 oral history interview, describing   
   the early days of network programming. “And we essentially were not told   
   what to do. We just were told, ‘Do good deeds.’ But the good deeds were   
   things like develop    
   electronic mail and protocols.”   
      
   David Lennox Mills was born on June 3, 1938, in Oakland, Calif. His mother,   
   Adele (Dougherty) Mills, was a pianist, and his father, Alfred, sold gaskets   
   used to prevent leaks in machinery.   
      
   David was born with glaucoma, and although childhood surgery restored some   
   degree of sight in his left eye, he would use oversized computer screens his   
   entire career. He attended a school for the blind in San Mateo, Calif., among   
   other institutions; a    
   teacher at one school told him that his poor vision meant that he would never   
   go to college.   
      
   He persevered and was accepted to the University of Michigan. There he   
   received bachelor’s degrees in engineering (1960) and engineering   
   mathematics (1961); master’s degrees in electrical engineering (1962) and   
   communications science (1964); and a    
   doctorate in computer and communications science (1971).   
      
   Computer science was just emerging as a field. It did not fully exist when he   
   arrived at Michigan, and when he submitted his doctoral dissertation over a   
   decade later, it was only the second of its kind ever completed at the   
   university.   
      
   He married Beverly Csizmadia in 1965. Along with their daughter, she survives   
   him, as do their son, Keith, and his brother, Gregory.   
      
   After teaching for two years at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Mills spent   
   five years at the University of Maryland before moving in 1977 to Comsat, a   
   federally funded corporation created to develop satellite communication   
   systems.   
      
   His work at Comsat put him in close contact with Dr. Cerf and others working   
   on Arpanet, which began in 1968 with just four computers at four research   
   institutions and grew to include about 40 institutions within a decade.   
      
   There was little hierarchy among those first researchers; they coordinated   
   their work over an early version of email and made decisions based on rough   
   consensus. Dr. Mills soon attached himself to the question of time because, he   
   later said, no one else    
   was doing it.   
      
   In 1986 he moved to the University of Delaware, which by then had become an   
   important East Coast hub for networking research. He took emeritus status in   
   2008 but continued to teach and conduct research.   
      
   Throughout his life, Dr. Mills was an ardent ham radio operator; as a teenager   
   he was in touch with Navy Seabees working in Antarctica and patched them   
   through to their families in the United States.   
      
   His two-story clapboard house in Newark had an enormous antenna array on its   
   roof. On his university website, he joked that “in emergencies, the rooftop   
   antenna can be converted into helicopter rotor blades and lift the house to   
   safety.”   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/technology/david-l-mills-dead.html   
      
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