This reminds me of a paper I read in college, "The Dangers of Replication."[1] It lays out the fundamental limits on distributed updates, and it's a good one to read if you haven't seen it before.
That is a pretty good paper. 1996. What it talks about is relevant. CAP wasn't talked about and distributed databases where not the topic of casual conversations between developers.
It mentions Lotus Notes. As a piece of trivia, the creator of CouchDB (Damien Katz) originally worked on Lotus Notes (at IBM). Then created CouchDB in his spare time. I believe its design is influenced by Lotus Notes quite a bit.
It wasn't a new paper when I took the class, either. None of the papers I read for that class were new. I took the fact that it was assigned reading to mean that the professor considered it timeless.
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~natassa/courses/15-823/current/papers...