History of Erlang

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1982 - 1985

Experiments with programming of telecom using > 20 different languages. Conclusion: The language must be a very high level symbolic language in order to achive productivity gains ! (Leaves us with: Lisp , Prolog , Parlog ...)

1985 - 86

Experiments with Lisp,Prolog, Parlog etc. Conclusion: The language must contain primitives for concurrency and error recovery, and the execution model must not have back-tracking. (Rules out Lisp and Prolog.) It must also have a granularity of concurrency such that one asyncronous telephony process is represented by one process in the language. (Rules out Parlog.) We must therefore develop our own language with the desirable features of Lisp, Prolog and Parlog, but with concurrency and error recovery built into the language.

1987

The first experiments with Erlang.

1988

ACS/Dunder Phase 1. Prototype construction of PABX functionality by external users Erlang escapes from the lab!

1989

ACS/Dunder Phase 2. Reconstruction of 1/10 of the complete MD-110 system. Results: >> 10 times greater gains in efficency at construction compared with construction in PLEX!

Further experiments with a fast implementation of Erlang.

1990

Erlang is presented at ISS'90, which results in several new users, e.g Bellcore.

1991

Fast implementation of Erlang is released to users. Erlang is represented at Telecom'91 . More functionality such as ASN1 - Compiler , graphical interface etc.

1992

A lot of new users, e.g several RACE projects. Erlang is ported to VxWorks, PC, Macintosh etc. Three applications using Erlang are presented at ISS'92. The two first product projects using Erlang are started.

1993

Distribution is added to Erlang, which makes it possible to run a homgeneous Erlang system on a heterogeneous hardware. Decision to sell implementations Erlang externally. Separate organization in Ericsson started to maintain and support Erlang implementations and Erlang Tools.