Lamport on writing "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System"

What Hacker News said

Recommends chatmasta · 2024-02 · on “”

The article itself isn't great, but it does briefly mention Leslie Lamport's 1978 paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distrib­uted System." In a 2016 interview, Lamport talked about his experience writing this paper and its association with special relativity. This short clip [0] from that interview is worth a watch. [0] [this video]

Cites LAC-Tech · 2023-02 · on “A Gentle Introduction to CRDTs”

Even with terrestrial applications that have very low clock skew, it can be very helpful to have a notion of which events could be effected by previous events and which couldn't have. But you're bang on the money with the physics analogy. Lamport himself says that his knowledge of special relativity helped him come up with the concept. [this video]

Cites myk9001 · 2023-07 · on “Vector Clocks: So what time is it?”

This isn't a coincidence. Vector clocks, roughly speaking, build upon the idea of Lamport Clocks. This isn't to say that one type of clock is better than the other. The choice between them depends on the task at hand and involves a set of trade-offs. Anyway, Leslie Lamport, who is considered the founding father of distributed systems as we know them today, introduced the concept of Lamport Clocks in his 1978 paper "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system" (for which he later won the Turing Award). According to Lamport, that paper was directly inspired by the special theory of relativity. In his own words [^1]: "[...] special relativity, in particular, the four-dimens