Comment by NelsonMinar

Dave Mills was helpful to me as a student. I did some research into NTP in 1999. I knew a little bit about it but not a lot and I said and did a lot of brash things (including sending query packets to every NTP server on the Internet). In response to my random poorly written mailing list and questions Dave answered me and gave me some useful pointers. I felt a little like I was talking to a celebrity.

NTP is a remarkable technology. Getting millisecond synchronization out of megahertz computers and barely-megabit computers was not easy. Honestly I'm not sure I would have thought it was even possible until I read the papers explaining how it worked. And Mills didn't just make it on his own, he helped create a small community of timekeeping experts on the Internet that persists to this day.