Dave accomplished many things in life, he started his career with the "Bandits of the Beltway" as they were called in "MilssSpeak" and there were things he was still not allowed to talk about, for example the guidance computer of the Minuteman-1 missiles, things no one wanted to hear on, e.g. 16-pulse Tactical Loran-C and things that are so big that they are hard to grasp: If Vint Cerf was the "father of the internet" Dave Mills was its grandfather.
Somewhere in the middle of that long list should also be said that he kept a single father and two young children sane and on track, on the opposite side of the globe.
A lot of stories center around Fuzzballs. Here is a background link on what was a fuzzball: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/52324.52337 Basically a minimal install to get a workstation-class machine connected to the Internet back when the Internet was a network of larger mainframe and minicomputers. Development was in a constant state of flux to try to add more features. So picture Fuzzballs as little mammals in an internet era of dinosaurs.
I worked with Dave from 1965 until he left Michigan about 5 or 6 years later. This was before the Internet, before NTP, before time.
In 1966 I was laying the foundation for what would become MTS and Dave was designing and building the Data Concentrator to connect the outside world to it. The Data Concentrator was almost certainly the first non-IBM device to be connected to an IBM channel, just after the "consent decree" that forced them to publish the specs. These specs were only approximately correct and Dave and I spent many hours at the consoles on the Data Concentrator and the Model 50 respectively debugging the interface. I would key in a small channel program and run it. The model 50 would go into a microcode loop while Dave scoped the interface. I would do a system reset on the 50 and he would patch the code in the PDP-8 and we would try again. After many iterations of this it finally worked.
Dave was very low vision even then. It's amazing he did as much as he did without the modern low vision aids. We used to joke that he would wire his nose into the back panel of the concentrator since he had to get so close to see the pins. In recent years I, too, have become low vision and Dave is my role model in this regard too. He had an unusual form of childhood glaucoma. For years the doctors kept one step ahead of it and he kept some vision, but when I EMailed him recently I learned that he had become completely blind.
For a few months Dave and I were the only consultants on the help desk at the Computing Center for one or two shifts a week. We had a lot of fun, but it must have been an odd experience for the students who came in for help with their MAD programs.
In spite of his vision problems, Dave was an avid photographer. In fact he took the picture of me at the 360/67 console that is floating around the Internet. Dave and I both went to Israel in 1969 with Bernie Galler's seminar series and spent a lot of time wandering around in our free time. Dave used to have photos from that trip up on his web site.
He was one of the most interesting and smartest people I have ever known. He will be missed by all who knew him.
Dave Mills has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246 - Jan 2024 (63 comments)