Man, I so love NTP. Y'all younglings have no idea what it was like in the day.

Us kids would literally "synchronize watches", like in the old war movies. We'd call the free "time and temperature" number to sync up. No one's clocks matched exactly. Now we just take it for granted.

Every device in my house is within 1-second of every other. LOL, I meet with people all over the globe on Zoom, and we're all on time. To the second.

NTP is so critical for the information age, I can't overstate it. If you're not a programmer or other such nerd, it's hard to get your head around how complex the NTP protocol is. Yet it works wonderfully! Much, much respect.

Guess it was ... his time.

Network time protocol protocol

Time as experienced throughout the universe stops abruptly as the true source of time sends its first and last kiss of death deny message back to the universe.

What a legacy to leave behind.

They coulda picked a better picture. Institutional cinderblock hallway, prominent fire extinguisher, florescent lighting, etc.

This is a shame. One of my first proper programming projects was a timesync client for the Amiga, back in the 1990s. It used SNTP (the simpler version of NTP), as everybody else seemed to be using other protocols (I think there's one called time which just returns the current time in text form). I was immensely proud of it, it's called FACTS if you want to look it up.

Anyway, David Mills is a bit of a hero of mine because that protocol inspired me to create some software, and probably made me even more obsessed with accurate time.

It's literally him...

The Architect