Time is an Illusion.
George V. Neville-Neil · Queue · 2015
One of the more surprising things about digital systems - and, in particular, modern computers - is how poorly they keep time. When most programs ran on a single system this was not a significant issue for the majority of software developers, but once software moved into the distributed-systems realm this inaccuracy became a significant challenge. Few programmers have read the most important paper in this area, Leslie Lamport’s "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" (1978), and only a few more have come to appreciate the problems they face once they move into the world of distributed systems.