Other than DDIA do you have a heuristic for finding the older papers? I often look for the seminal works but it’s hard when you don’t know who the key people are in a new field. Do you just look for highest number of citations on google scholar or something else?
Yeah just go to wikipedia and find out who coined the term :) I love the original version vector paper, it's from 1983 and kind of funny in parts:
"Network partitioning can completely destroy mutual consistency in the worst case, and this fact has led to a certain amount of restrictiveness, vagueness, and even nervousness in past discussions, of how it may be handled"
But as a general starting point, all roads seem to lead to Lamport 78 (Time, Clocks). If you have a specific area of interest I or others might be able to point you in the right direction.
For example in the world of engines, Heywood is basically god: (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=John...) has 29k citations!