The SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award was instituted in 2005 to recognize the most influential Operating Systems papers that were published at least ten years in the past. Al Demers was recognized for his paper "Managing update conflicts in Bayou, a weakly connected replicated storage system."
Abstract: Bayou is a replicated storage system that anticipated the world of numerous small mobile devices executing collaborative applications over unreliable networks. The paper describes a client-server storage structure supporting eventual consistency, anti-entropy protocols, disconnected operation, log-based recovery, and an application-centered approach to detecting and resolving update conflicts to arrive at consistent replicas. These concepts were backed up by a prototype implementation, two applications, and a simple performance evaluation. Bayou is still relevant to the problems faced by, and the solutions employed by, a large number of today's modern applications.