A distributed system can be described as a particular sequential state machine that is implemented with a network of processors. The ability to totally order the input requests leads immediately to an algorithm to implement an arbitrary state machine by a network of processors, and hence to implement any distributed system. So, I wrote this paper, which is about how to implement an arbitrary distributed state machine. As an illustration, I used the simplest example of a distributed system I could think of - a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm. This is my most often cited paper.
Many computer scientists claim to have read it.
But I don't think I ever encountered anyone who was aware that the paper said anything about state machines. They seem to think that it is about either the causality relation on events in a distributed system, or the distributed mutual exclusion problem. People have insisted that there is nothing about state machines in the paper. I've even had to go back and reread it to convince myself that I really did remember what I had written. The paper describes the synchronization of logical clocks.