ABSTRACT
Network Time Protocol (NTP) was an active participant in the early development of Internet technology, and its timestamps recorded many milestones in measurement and prototyping programs. The roots of NTP can be traced to a demonstration at the National Computer Conference in 1979, believed to be the first public coming-out party of the Internet sending mail, speech, and facsimile messages over a trans-Atlantic satellite network. There is a certain sense of the radio amateur in the deployment of NTP around the globe. Certainly, each new country found running NTP was a new notch in the belt. An interesting application of the pulse-per-second (PPS) signal was in Norway, where a Fuzzball NTP primary server was connected to a cesium frequency standard with PPS output. In retrospect, while NTP has been a technical adventure in its own right by providing the means for accurate and dependable time synchronization, NTP has also been an enabling technology for practical uses of synchronized clocks.
