Until now, little research has been done on methods to combine the seemingly incompatible paradigms of hard and soft real-time systems. To this end, we have developed Dedos, a dependable distributed operating system. The driving forces behind the project are twofold: to meet the demand for dependable distributed control systems, especially in the area of embedded systems and industrial control; and to increase the productivity and quality of application programming for distributed control. Our current focus is on hard real-time issues; soft real-time needs are handled by conventional techniques. However, our work has raised interesting questions about the communication between the soft and hard real-time tasks of the system, which is necessary to pass externally specified control parameters and control status information. The problem is that the data set must always be consistent (concurrency atomicity), but hard real-time activities can never be delayed by soft real-time ones. Other intriguing questions are related to the integration of the reliability and security concepts that are used in the two parts of the systems. in this paper, however, we limit our discussion to the Dedos development model, the Dedos programming model, hard real-time scheduling, and the distributed algorithms needed to implement the Dedos execution environment.