this thread reminds me about something that I wanted to ask you. if I recall correctly, most of the literature references in STM papers are recent, so I wondered whether you are aware of this one: NAMING AND SYNCHRONIZATION IN A DECENTRALIZED COMPUTER SYSTEM SourceTechnical Report: TR-205 Year of Publication: 1978 Author D. P. Reed I'm not entirely sure where I got my version from (it was mentioned as a cornerstone in Alan Kay et al s latest project, Croquet, on which Reed is a collaborator: http://www.opencroquet.org/ ), but here is the abstract: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=889815 (note that it mentions both grouping of updates, and synchronized composition of modules with local synchronization constraints) and this might be the official site for the scanned copy (?): http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/specpub.php?id=773 just wondering, claus