NTP Timelord Dies | Hacker News Reader

NTP Timelord Dies

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45 pointstalonx6 comments

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Related news and some anecdotes from a few weeks ago:

Dave Mills has died

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246

Vint Cerf is accumulating Dave Mills stories

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39063732

"Timelord" is probably among the most amazing epitaphs one could achieve. RIP to a pioneer.

He played a prominent role in the New Yorker's article on NTP a year and a half ago: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thor... There was some discussion of the difficulty of transitioning BDFLs.

I didn't know him, and sadly had never heard of him, but it's just incredible to think that something as foundational and essential as NTP was invented by one person. What an amazing legacy to leave behind.

Not to take the focus off Dr. Mills, but I imagine at this point there are quite a few big names in the early Internet who have passed by now. It feels incredibly sad to me to think that at some point, the Internet will just be humming along, but none of the people who worked on its original foundations will be around anymore.

I do wonder if that will end up lending the internet almost a mythological/spiritual status. What happens to our relationship to this thing, that already almost no one truly understands how it works, as we get generations away from the people who actually created it?

Will this happen to foundational protocols like TCP? New developments (e.g. increasing the initial congestion window ~2010) keep taking place from time to time in TCP. I think technologies which have ongoing research will always have a pool of folks who understand them deeply. I'm not aware if that's true of NTP.

On a different note, your comment reminded me of what happens to the atomic generators as the Galactic Empire collapses in Asimov's Foundation series. As research and innovation die out, nobody understands how they work anymore, and their maintenance is taken over by hereditary guilds of "tech-men" who refuse to entertain the possibility of the great generators ever breaking down.

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