MX: a real-time fault and change-tolerant distributed system

The paper describes the Media Exchange (MX) system, a generic distributed platform that supports specialized mission-critical applications for multi-media communications (voice, data, video, and telemetry). It describes the goals and strategies used to implement the platform and initial application set in the financial market domain, and discusses several areas for improvement. It concludes that the focus on change-tolerance provides the necessary ease of extension and design flexibility to support system enhancements and new applications for many years to come