@memory
RIP: David Mills

In 1977, Mills began working at #COMSAT.

There he worked on synchronizing the clocks of computers connected to #ARPANET, inventing the Network Time Protocol. #NTP

He told The New Yorker in 2022 that he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was working on it, giving him his own "little fief".

In the mid-2000s, Mills turned over full control of the NTP reference implementation to Harlan Stenn.

Mills was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force ( #GADS ) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.

He invented the DEC LSI-11 based #Fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), inspired the author of #ping for BSD (1983), and had the first #FTP implementation. He authored numerous #RFCs.