This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Trends in Distributed Systems, TreDS ''96, held in Aachen, Germany, in October 1996. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 51 submissions; also included is an invited paper by Sape Mullender and Paul Sijben on quality of service in distributed multimedia systems. Beyond the topic of the CORBA architecture and implementations, the book addresses interoperability issues, formal methods, multimedia communication services, distributed object systems, coordination protocols, reuse, workflow management, etc.