In recent years, the field of distributed processing, distributed systems, has undergone great change, and has been an area attracting tremendous research and development efforts. This thesis explores the various current methodologies for designing, developing and implementing distributed systems using the Ada programming language, and goes on to implement a simulation of a distributed store system using the "virtual node" design approach. After a brief introduction on distributed systems in general, an investigation of the basic issues and problems involved in distributing Ada programs coupled with an analysis and comparison of various approaches to developing distributed Ada systems is carried out. It is shown that one of the critical problems of Ada in a distributed environment is its implicit assumption of a single memory processor. A simulation of a distributed system (store system) is carried out using the virtual node method of developing distributed Ada systems. The various stages of this design method including interface task specification are stepped through. A sample run of the. system is given, including the customer file, stock file data and the monitored output of the system.