When I first started reading seminal works in Distributed Computing, I picked up the original (The Part-time Parliament) and it started off pretty well with the made up story of finding the algorithm as a manuscript from an archeological dig.

The original paper then quickly becomes super convoluted by continuing to explain the algorithm by overextending that allegory. By the mid point of it I felt pretty exhausted.

It was then I learnt that the original paper was lying in limbo for nearly a decade until it was finally published.

Then at a conference, Lamport got tired of people telling him his original was difficult to grasp and so came this simplified explanation.

I still have my notes on the paper somewhere in my Obsidian. I should publish those.