David L. Mills

Inventor of the Network Time Protocol, the fuzzball router, and the Exterior Gateway Protocol, Mills was an American computer engineer and Internet pioneer. He earned his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971. While at Michigan, he worked on the ARPA-sponsored Conversational Use of Computers (CONCOMP) project and developed DEC PDP-8 based hardware and software to allow terminals to be connected over phone lines to an IBM 360 mainframe. He served as the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force (GADS) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.

Mills invented the Network Time Protocol (1981), the DEC LSI-11 based fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), the Exterior Gateway Protocol (1984), inspired the author of ping for BSD (1983), and had the first FTP implementation. He authored numerous RFCs.

In 1999, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2002, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In 2008, Mills was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He held the position of Emeritus Professor at the University of Delaware, where he served as a full Professor from 1986 to 2008, and also held an adjunct appointment at Delaware so that he could continue to teach.