this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show to c/news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
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[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 75 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] hikaru755@feddit.de 9 points 2 years ago

Every device in my house is within 1-second of every other.

Meanwhile, my new oven's clock drifts by over a minute in just a few days after setting it to the correct time, smh

[–] xpinchx@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Lol I was very much doing the same as a kid, but this comment read like an old timer telling of an age long ago. I legit typed out "that was interesting man, thanks for sharing".

Not sure wether to laugh or cry because I'm so old 😂

[–] chirospasm@lemmy.ml 38 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Guess it was ... his time.

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hey! Knock off the puns before I clock ya!

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Now wait a minute, no need to be hasty

[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It was his turn, next may be hours.

[–] SharkAttak@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

And not a moment too late.

[–] JustUseMint@lemmy.world 31 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Network time protocol protocol

[–] isgleas@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Along the DNS system, one of the most used ones in the whole international internet network

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

MAC address

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

I'm a fan of ELF format. Can I join you?

[–] LanternEverywhere@kbin.social 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

[–] athos77@kbin.social 18 points 2 years ago

It's from Wikipedia. It's nice to see he was still working in 2005 - I suspect this was taken at University of Delaware.

[–] aeronmelon@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The best people in history are the ones who don't want to stop working just to get their picture taken.

One of my favorite pictures of a person ever is Albert Einstein just working at his desk, oblivious to everything around him.

[–] LanternEverywhere@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm sure better pictures of him exist

EDIT

Like this one, which is the first image search result

https://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2012/dec/mills-research-computer-120711.html

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 16 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It's literally him...

[–] LanternEverywhere@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Error on your link

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks for the warning! The picture is visible only on db0 for some reason...

[–] Odo@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yeah, the domain part got replaced with "*removed*". I've seen that before when some instances censor certain slurs, but it's hard to imagine what's wrong with ibb.co that'd get it added to a filter.

Edit: And now I can confirm that just typing out the URL i-dot-ibb-dot-co gets filtered on lemmy.world. Weird.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

Initially I uploaded a whole picture to Lemmy, and it didn't work on other instances. When the other poster warned me of that, I replaced it with a direct link to ibb, and I thought it should work fine, but now you notice not even that works. Again, thanks for notifying me, it's quite weird, perhaps due to some overzealous filtering on .world, or just a bug on db0...

[–] BetaBlake@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

The Architect