Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm embarrassed to include myself among the ignorant masses--I just assumed this was for his work on LaTeX. The distributed systems stuff sounds much more interesting though. Looks like I have some reading to do! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
Yep. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is cited in basically every distributed systems paper ever, and the ideas in it are behind, among other things, Amazon's Dynamo. It's also fairly accessible. One of the first systems papers I read, and while I certainly felt in over my head, I got the high level ideas
For me, the timing could not have been better; I'm to write and present a summary of that paper this week. It's an excellent paper, and while I am probably wrong, it feels like it defines the vocabulary for talking about time in computer systems. The very first episode of Star Trek: DS9 comes to mind; Captain Benjamin Sisco has met an alien species that does not exist in our system of linear time. Sisco cannot explain 'time' to the creature as he sees it as an innate part of communication. It is my belief that he would have a much better chance, had he read this paper.