This volume contains the proceedings of an international workshop on "Experiences with Distributed Systems" held September 28-30, 1987, at the University of Kaiserslautern. The workshop was jointly sponsored and organized by the Sonderforschungsbereich 124 "VSLI-Entwurfsmethoden und Parallelität" and the European Network Center (ENC) of the IBM Corporation, Heidelberg. The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers who had gathered substantial experience with the implementation of distributed systems. The emphasis was put on the exchange of (good and bad) experiences with existing concepts in distributed system design rather than presenting new ideas. Participation in the workshop was by invitation only. The presentations can be roughly categorized as reports on a specific project or reports on experiences with a certain topic accumulated through several projects. Other lectures treated general topics such as fault tolerance, design principles for distributed languages and systems, and distributed databases.