A theoretician's view of fault tolerant distributed computing -- A comparison of the Byzantine Agreement problem and the Transaction Commit Problem -- The state machine approach: A tutorial -- A simple model for agreement in distributed systems -- Atomic broadcast in a real-time environment -- Randomized agreement protocols -- An overview of clock synchronization -- Implementation issues in clock synchronization -- Argus -- TABS -- Communication support for reliable distributed computing -- Algorithms and system design in the highly available systems project -- Easy impossibility proofs for distributed consensus problems -- An efficient, fault-tolerant protocol for replicated data management -- Arpanet routing -- On the relationship between the atomic commitment and consensus problems -- The August system -- The sequoia system -- Fault tolerance in distributed UNIX -- Faults and their manifestation -- The “Engineering” of fault-tolerant distributed computing systems -- Bibliography for fault-tolerant distributed computing.

The goal of the Asilomar Workshop on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing, held March 17-19, 1986, was to facilitate interaction between theoreticians and practitioners by inviting speakers and choosing topics so as to present a broad overview of the field. This volume contains 22 papers stemming from the workshop, most of them revised and rewritten, presenting research results in distributed systems and fault-tolerant architectures and systems. The volume should be of use to students, researchers and developers.