Interesting. I'd thought that "The Paxos algorithm for consensus in a message-passing system was first described by Lamport in 1990 in a tech report that was wi

Interesting. I'd thought that "The Paxos algorithm for consensus in a message-passing system was first described by Lamport in 1990 in a tech report that was widely considered to be a joke [1]" was pretty much the standard interpretation. Perhaps i'd read the Turing award writeup to literally. "Unfortunately the setting as a Greek parable made the paper difficult for most readers to comprehend, and it took nine years from submission to publication in 1998. But the 1989 DEC technical report did get noticed. Lamport's colleague Butler Lampson evangelized the idea to the distributed computing community [19]. Shortly after the publication of Paxos, Google's Chubby system and Apache's open-source ZooKeeper offered State Machine Replication as an external, widely-deployed service." It's a little odd, nobody seems to have actually used it before oh, say 2000 or so, but maybe it was in secret proprietary kinds of stuff. [1] http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/pinewiki/Paxos.html http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/pinewiki/Paxos.html [2] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm