Marching to Many Distant Drummers

In 1990, there were two competing proposals for a time service for the Internet. One was from the DEC networking group and the other was in an RFC by David Mills. The people in DEC asked me for theoretical support for their belief that their proposal was better than that of Mills. I asked Tim Mann to help me. We decided that we didn’t like either proposal very much, and instead we wrote a note with our own idea for an algorithm to obtain the correct time in an Internet-like environment. We sat on the idea for a few years, and eventually Tim presented it at a Dagstuhl workshop on time synchronization. We then began writing a more rigorous paper on the subject. This is as far as we got. The paper is mostly finished, but it contains some minor errors in the statements of the theorems and the proofs are not completed. We are unlikely ever to work on this paper again.