This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate De Mayo.

A brief note written upon learning that computer scientist David Mills has died at the age of 85.

There was a day, a regular work day in 1985, and there is some irony in the fact that I can't be any more specific than that, but there was a day when David Mills, after wrestling with the same problem for several years,

cracked the code, or came up with the code,

developed the program that allowed the machines linked on the Arpenet,

the first sustained stab at network computing

that would evolve in the ensuing decades into the internet as we know it today.

It allowed those computers to share time, to operate according to the same clock,

so when a computer in an office in San Francisco would send a message

at precisely 1105 a.m. to a computer down in Palo Alto, both computers would know what

1105 meant. This was an old problem that had been made new in the computer age.

People had struggled to get on the same page time-wise since the invention of timekeeping devices.

If the king demanded that you appear in court at 4 o'clock,

you better know which four of which clock,

because the one in the castle belfry could well run quite differently

than the one in your neighborhood church, say.

And when the railroads came and the speed of travel between places accelerated,

it mattered that having taking the nine o'clock leaving from Boston or Columbus to make a meeting in Providence or Dayton

and then made the hour's journey from one to the other. It was important that it would be ten

when you arrived. And so cities and countries and businesses and the railroads themselves

began to work together to develop ways to formally agree about the time.

...