Annotation Proceedings of the February 1997 workshop, WORDS'97, include one panel discussion--selecting quality of service in a heterogeneous environment: bandwidth, security, fault tolerance and real-time behavior. The rest of the 45 papers are organized in sessions on models/language, operating systems/architecture, system engineering, system validation and verification, applications, dependability and fault tolerance, and communication. Two early bird sessions covered a variety of topics, including object-based checkpoints in distributed systems and time-bounded cooperative recovery with the distributed real-time application. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.