Dave Mills created NTP, the protocol that holds the temporal Internet together, in 1985.
  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1721·
    10 months ago

    Wtf is this headline? When this guy dies you put the GMT he died at in hours, minutes, seconds. Not “85”. Respect.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
    133·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      432·
      10 months ago

      We’re already fucking it up. Facebook and Xitter exist.

      • Bogasse@lemmy.mlEnglish
        15·
        10 months ago

        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 👌

  • BudgieMania@kbin.social
    711·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • RedAggroBest@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      10 months ago

      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?

  • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • Veedem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • BudgieMania@kbin.social
      492·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    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!

  • k-rad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    10 months ago

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