Related news and some anecdotes from a few weeks ago:<p><i>Dave Mills has died</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246</a><p><i>Vint Cerf is accumulating Dave Mills stories</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39063732">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39063732</a>
He played a prominent role in the New Yorker's article on NTP a year and a half ago: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thor...</a> 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.<p>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.