The System R retrospective paper is a pretty masterful example of a CS systems paper:<p><a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf</a><p>It helps that they are describing a pioneering software project and they had the benefit of hindsight, but nonetheless, a great read.