Comment by neilv
3 years ago
> Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. “Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP.”
I'd guess the capitalized "Sun" was a pun, for the Sun Microsystems computers that still ran much of the Internet. For example: https://www.sunmanagers.org/1992/1188.html
It’s a play on a well-known description of the extent of the British Empire in its time. And which still, if you squint a bit, remains true today, at least according to Randall Munroe*
* https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/
Thanks, great information. (I'd heard the saying, but I see capitalized Sun so much to refer to the computers, that I guess I always read it that way, and forgot our star is also capitalized.)
Sun definitely advanced the state of the art. They had a well written set of three Blue Papers on timekeeping in SunOS, if you can find them after Oracle ate everything. Their implementation was mostly Mills ntpd but had to tweak it for their motherboard realtime clocks. Both ntpd and the Sun RTC were the source of much debugging amusement. But that's another story :-)