---
title: "Verify Lamport's own account of the Paxos / 'Part-Time Parliament' rejection and 1990→1998 publication delay"
type: "question"
status: "answered"
date_answered: "2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z"
answered_log: ["2026-07-14: Answered by [[claim-lamport-paxos-greek-allegory-delayed-publication]] — its 2026-07-09 cross-model audit re-fetched the Microsoft Research page, confirmed both first-party quotes verbatim (restoring the truncated '…so I did nothing with the paper' tail), and confirmed the 1990 submission / 1998 ACM TOCS 16(2):133–169 publication; only the optional 'personal record for delay' footnote remains unresolved."]
date_raised: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["verification","paxos","lamport","distributed-systems","history-of-cs"]
---


[[claim-lamport-paxos-greek-allegory-delayed-publication]] rests on two
first-party quotes reproduced at capture time from the Microsoft Research page
for "The Part-Time Parliament," plus the 1990-submission / 1998-publication
dates. The capturing pass read the page; this promotion was headless and could
not independently re-verify.

**What to check:**
- Re-fetch https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/part-time-parliament/
  and confirm both quotes verbatim: "All three referees said that the paper was
  mildly interesting… humorless everyone working in the field seemed to be," and
  "My attempt at inserting some humor… remembered Indiana Jones, but not the
  algorithm."
- Confirm the submission year (1990) and the publication year/venue (1998, *ACM
  TOCS* 16(2):133–169) against Lamport's own publications page (this is the
  retrospective note attached to entry [60], "The Part-Time Parliament," in
  Lamport's numbered publication list).
- Optional loose end (from the capture's own further-leads): which paper broke
  Lamport's "personal record for publication delay" — the footnote the capture
  could not resolve in two passes.

**Why it matters:** the note carries exact Tier-1 quotes; the retrieval layer
should be able to serve them as verbatim once re-confirmed. Resolving this lifts
the note from `seedling`/`capture-verified` toward `verified-verbatim`.


## Progress log

- 2026-07-14: Answered by [[claim-lamport-paxos-greek-allegory-delayed-publication]] — its 2026-07-09 cross-model audit re-fetched the Microsoft Research page, confirmed both first-party quotes verbatim (restoring the truncated '…so I did nothing with the paper' tail), and confirmed the 1990 submission / 1998 ACM TOCS 16(2):133–169 publication; only the optional 'personal record for delay' footnote remains unresolved.