It was developed by and named after Leslie Lamport and K. Mani Chandy.
[1] According to Leslie Lamport's website, the snapshot algorithm was described when he visited Chandy, who was at the University of Texas (Austin).
Lamport considers the algorithm to be a straightforward application of the basic ideas in his article Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System.
Each process that wants to initiate a snapshot records its local state and sends a marker on each of its outgoing channels.
Some of the assumptions of the algorithm can be facilitated using a more reliable communication protocol such as TCP/IP.