On January 17th, 2024, Dr. David L. Mills died at his home in Newark, Delaware, at the age of 85.
He had invented the Network Time Protocol in the early 1980s, written and maintained its reference implementation for decades, and in doing so had quietly made it possible for the entire Internet to agree on what time it was. Every clock that ticks in step across the network ticks, in some lineage, from his work. Our entire project existed because that work was too important to let decay - we had forked his code, argued with his successor about how to steward it, deleted great swaths of it, and hardened the rest, all out of a kind of fierce respect.
On January 21st we posted a memorial. We wrote that the more we had read of his sources, the more we had come to see his insight, his technical reach, and his hope that a little "inter-network experiment" might grow to span the world. It had. We ended it the only way it could end: the clocks of the world tick together in time, in large part, because of you.
It was, by the raw numbers, the quietest year in the project’s history - the development list carried just over a hundred messages all year, its lowest ebb. There is something fitting, if sad, in the fork of NTP going still in the year its creator’s clock finally stopped.
