AVAILABLE ELECTRONICALLY

    "The Part-Time Parliament."
    Leslie Lamport.
     September 1, 1989.  43 pages.

Author's abstract

    Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal
    that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity
    of its part-time legislators.  The legislators maintained consistent
    copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays
    from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers.  The
    Paxon parliament's protocol provides a new way of implementing the
    state-machine approach to the design of distributed systems---an
    approach that has received limited attention because it leads to
    designs of insufficient complexity.