“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

Email of 28 May 1987 https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt
As quoted in [Teresa K. Attwood, Stephen R. Pettifer, David Thorne, Bioinformatics Challenges at the Interface of Biology and Computer Science: Mind the Gap, https://books.google.com/books?id=_i-8DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA266, 26 September 2016, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-03548-1, 266–]

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American computer scientist 1941

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