David Mills, the creator of an obscure software system that synchronizes clocks on the Web, has served as the Internet’s Father Time. But his tenure is coming to an end.
In 1977, David Mills, an eccentric engineer and computer scientist, took a job at, a satellite corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C. Mills was an inveterate tinkerer: he’d once built a hearing aid for a girlfriend’s uncle, and had consulted for Ford on how paper-tape computers might be put into cars. Now, at, the computer network that would become the precursor to the Internet.
A couple of years ago, I visited Mills in his unassuming house in the Delaware suburbs. He and his wife, Beverly, have lived there since 1986, when Mills became a professor at the University of Delaware, a position he held for twenty-two years until his retirement. While we sat in his kitchen, our conversation was regularly interrupted by an automated voice announcing the time from the next room. The oven and microwave clocks were out of synch.
The family moved around, and Mills’s teachers didn’t always accommodate his visual impairment. Mills recalls an eleventh-grade teacher telling him, “You’re never going to get to college”—a remark that was “like waving a flag in front of a bull,” he said. In 1971, Mills earned a Ph.D.
Perfection is an elusive dream in engineering. Mills received a stream of complaints about N.T.P.’s hiccups, and also suggestions for possible patches and improvements. Unprecedented problems arose. Some hardware designers who’d built N.T.P. into their devices turned out to have configured it improperly; the devices sent suffocating swarms of messages to individual servers in places such as Wisconsin and Denmark. Some coders thought N.T.P. was to blame.
By the mid-nineties, Mills entrusted Stenn with releasing new versions of the code. Stenn had started working at an insurance company, but his responsibilities there largely involved being around in case a system failed. He began devoting most of his working hours to N.T.P. The two often clashed, yet, a decade later, Stenn got Mills’s permission to take full control of N.T.P.’s reference implementation.
There have been more elemental concerns, too. The speed of the Earth’s rotation is affected by a variety of atmospheric and geologic factors, including the behavior of the planet’s inner layers; the reshaping of its crust, such as through the growth of mountains or bodies of magma; and the friction of the ocean’s tides against the seafloor. The aggregate effect of these forces has historically been to slow the rate at which the planet spins.
Meanwhile, for unknown reasons, the Earth’s rotation has been going against trend in recent years: instead of slowing, it has been accelerating. This year had the shortest day observed since people started tracking the length of the day, about a half century ago. If this development continues, then the world may need to remove a second rather than add one—a task that the architects of modern time synchronization have yet to attempt.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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