[ih] nice story about dave mills and NTP (off topic - re. hop counts)

[Miles Fidelman]

Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> On 10/1/22 16:30, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>> in the New Yorker
>>
>> https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time 
>>
>>
>> v
>
> Agree, nice story.   Dave did a *lot* of good work.  Reading the 
> article reminded me of the genesis of NTP.

Yes... great story!
> emember talking with Dave back at the early Internet meetings, and his 
> fervor to try things out, and his disappointment at the lack of the 
> core gateway's ability to measure much of anything.   In particular, 
> it was difficult to measure how long things took in the Internet, 
> since the gateways didn't even have real-time clocks. This caused a 
> lot of concern about protocol elements such as Time-To-Live, which 
> were temporarily to be implemented purely as "hop counts", pending the 
> introduction of some mechanism for measuring Time into the gateways.  
> (AFAIK, we're still waiting....)
>
This reminds me that "hop count" might well be a good measure of time in 
the real world - e.g, when thinking about frames of data, propagating 
through parallel computing fabrics.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown