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 (see http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-paxos for Lamport's description of the history). The algorithm was finally published in 1998 in TOCS Lamport, The part-time parliament, ACM Transactions on Computer Syste