David L. Mills was an Internet pioneer who developed the timekeeping protocols used in financial markets, power grids, satellites, and to enable billions of computers to run them simultaneously, and has been around for decades. and gained a reputation as the “Father of Time” of the Internet. He died on January 17th at his home in Newark, Delaware. He passed away at the age of 85.
His daughter, Lee Schnitzler, confirmed his death.
Dr. Mills is a computer scientist who developed Arpanet, a relatively small network of linked computers in academic and research institutions, and its global successor, the Internet, from the 1960s to the 1990s. He was one of the inner circle.
Developing the hardware and software necessary to connect even a small number of computers was extremely difficult. However, Dr. Mills and his colleagues recognized that they also needed to create the protocols necessary to ensure that the devices could communicate accurately.
His focus was time. Every machine has its own internal clock, but a network of devices must operate simultaneously to a fraction of a millisecond. His answer, first implemented in 1985, was his Network Time protocol.
This protocol relies on a layered hierarchy of devices. At the bottom are the daily servers. These periodically ping upwards to a small number of more powerful servers, which in turn ping upwards to another small number of more powerful servers linked to an array of timekeeping devices such as atomic clocks. Send all the way to the server.
Based on consensus times extracted from these core devices, “official” times are passed back down the hierarchy. There are algorithms built into the system that find and correct errors down to a tenth of a millisecond.
This process is very complex for several reasons. Data moves at different speeds between different types of cables. Your computer may run faster or slower. Packets of data may also be temporarily held along the way by routers known as store-and-forward switches. Doing all of this required some advanced programming from Dr. Mills, surprising even other Internet pioneers.
“I was always amazed at the fact that he could actually get highly synchronized time from this store-and-forward system with variable delays and everything,” said Arpanet of developing the early protocols. Contributed, now Google’s vice president, said in a phone interview. “But that’s because I didn’t fully understand Einstein’s calculations that were being done.”
Dr. Mills, who spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Delaware, not only published the protocol but updated it regularly over the next two decades, becoming the Internet’s quasi-official timekeeper, but he calls himself the “Internet Grease Monkey.” ” was called.”
The Network Time Protocol is just one of Dr. Mills’ contributions to the underlying architecture of the Internet. He created his fourth version of the Internet Protocol in 1978, the Basic Playbook. This is the main version still in use today.
He also created the first modern network router in the late 1970s. This provided the backbone for his NSFnet, the successor to his Arpanet, which evolved into the modern Internet. He liked quirky names, so he called his router “Fur Ball.”
“It was a sandbox,” he said of his early days in network programming in a 2004 oral history interview. “And we were basically not told what to do. We were just told, ‘Be good.’ But the good deeds were things like developing email and protocols. ”
David Lennox Mills was born on June 3, 1938 in Oakland, California. His mother, Adele (Doherty) Mills, was a pianist, and his father, Alfred, sold gaskets to prevent leaks in machinery.
David was born with glaucoma, and although a childhood surgery restored some vision in his left eye, he was forced to use oversized computer screens for the rest of his life. He attended a school for the blind in San Mateo, California, where his teacher told him that he would not be able to attend college because of his poor eyesight.
He persevered and got into the University of Michigan. There he earned bachelor’s degrees in engineering (1960) and engineering mathematics (1961). Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering (1962) and Communication Science (1964). He received his PhD in Computer and Communication Science (1971).
Computer science was just emerging as a field. This system was completely non-existent when he arrived at Michigan, and when he submitted his doctoral dissertation more than a decade later, it was only the second of its kind ever completed at the university. There wasn’t.
He married Beverly Sizmadia in 1965. Along with her daughter she also survives, as does her son Keith and her brother Gregory.
After teaching for two years at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Mills spent five years at the University of Maryland and joined Comsat, a federally funded company founded in 1977 to develop satellite communications systems. I have moved.
In his work at Comsat, he was in close contact with Dr. Cerf and others working on Arpanet. Arpanet started with just his four computers at his four research institutions in 1968 and grew within 10 years to include approximately 40 participating institutions.
There was little hierarchy among the original researchers. They used early versions of email to coordinate their work and make decisions based on rough consensus. Dr. Mills soon became obsessed with the question of time because, he later said, he saw no one else doing it.
In 1986 he moved to the University of Delaware. The University of Delaware had by then become an important East Coast center for networking research. Although he became an honorary member in 2008, he continued to pursue his teaching and research.
Dr. Mills was an avid amateur radio operator throughout his life. In his teens, he contacted Navy Seabees operating in Antarctica and connected them to family in the United States.
His two-story clapboard house in Newark had a huge antenna array on its roof. “In an emergency, the rooftop antenna can be transformed into a helicopter rotor blade to lift the house to safety,” he joked on the university’s website.
