Remembering Dave Mills: The Father of Internet Time and NTP’s Legacy

David L. Mills, a pioneering computer scientist who helped create the early Internet, passed away at 85, leaving a lasting technical legacy.

He is best known for inventing and implementing the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which enables computers to synchronize their clocks and earned him the nickname “father of Internet time.”

His daughter informed Vint Cerf, who shared the news on the “Internet History” mailing list.

Colleagues recall that if Vint Cerf is called the “father of the Internet,” Mills can be considered its “grandfather.”

Mills suffered from glaucoma from childhood, eventually becoming completely blind, yet continued his work.

Eric S. Raymond launched the NTPsec project as a modern successor to Mills’s original design.

As a child, Mills attended a school for the visually impaired, developed an interest in model railroads and amateur radio (callsign W3HCF), and later earned a Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Science from the University of Michigan in 1971.

After teaching in Edinburgh and Maryland, he left academia, joined industry, and became one of the engineers who built the Internet. He served as the first chair of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures (GADS) task group and later the Internet Architecture (INARC) task group, the predecessor of today’s IETF.

His daughter notes his love for wordplay, coining terms such as “truechimers” and “falsetickers” for reliable and unreliable time servers.

Mills also wrote what may have been the first FTP client, transformed a DEC PDP‑11 into a “Fuzzball” router, and inspired the creation of the ping utility.

In 1986 he became a professor at the University of Delaware, authored 28 RFCs (including the NTP proposals and versions 1‑4), and received numerous honors: ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, member of the National Academy of Engineering, the PTTI Distinguished Service Award, and the IEEE Internet Award.

Beyond his achievements, he was known for his playful spirit, teaching his children games that involved dialing into servers and playing Zork.

David Lennox Mills was born on June 3 1938 in Oakland, California, and died on January 17 2024 in Newark, Delaware. He is remembered as a true pioneer of the Internet.

“We were curious about what our father did in his study… He taught us to pick up the phone, call a server, and place the receiver next to the coupler… If it was after 5 p.m. Pacific time we would see a description of a white‑house courtyard; before 5 p.m. a black‑knight would appear and cut off our heads.”