Chuck Darwin<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://m.blank.org/@memory" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>memory</span></a></span> <br>RIP: David Mills</p><p>In 1977, Mills began working at <a href="https://c.im/tags/COMSAT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>COMSAT</span></a>. </p><p>There he worked on synchronizing the clocks of computers connected to <a href="https://c.im/tags/ARPANET" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ARPANET</span></a>, inventing the Network Time Protocol. <a href="https://c.im/tags/NTP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>NTP</span></a></p><p>He told The New Yorker in 2022 that he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was working on it, giving him his own "little fief".</p><p>In the mid-2000s, Mills turned over full control of the NTP reference implementation to Harlan Stenn.</p><p>Mills was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force ( <a href="https://c.im/tags/GADS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>GADS</span></a> ) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.</p><p>He invented the DEC LSI-11 based <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fuzzball" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Fuzzball</span></a> router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), inspired the author of <a href="https://c.im/tags/ping" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ping</span></a> for BSD (1983), and had the first <a href="https://c.im/tags/FTP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>FTP</span></a> implementation. He authored numerous <a href="https://c.im/tags/RFCs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RFCs</span></a>.</p>