[colmmacc]

Long before the CAP theorem paper I remember learning the same thing in the context of routing protocols like BGP and it being an "aha moment". It really helped me understand that there is no single version of the state of distributed systems and that it is all local and a matter of perspective under a partition. When the paper came out I remember thinking how trivial and obvious the conclusion was, and it confused me that it was getting attention ... but in retrospect the reformulation and acronym helped bring understanding to a far broader audience, especially software people. That's really good impact and effectiveness and I wish more academic papers were focused on this.