6. The industrial use of Erlang
Erlang was developed at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory and started to spread outside the lab for internal use in Ericsson in 1987. The first projects were simple prototypes written using a very slow version of Erlang which was implemented in Prolong.
Work with the interpreter led to the development of a much faster Erlang machine [ARM92b] which was loosely based on the WAM with extensions to handle process creation and message passing.
The availability of a faster Erlang implementation encouraged the spread of the language within Ericsson and a number of experimental projects were started. At the time of writing some of these have developed into full-scale Ericsson products.
In 1994 the first International Erlang Conference was held in Stockholm. This conference, which publishes no proceedings has been held every year since 1994. The 1995 conference attracted 160 delegates from 10 different countries. The Erlang conference is the principle forum within Ericsson for reporting work done with Erlang.
By 1995 three projects had matured into stable commercial products, these were:
-NETSim - Network Element Test Simulator.
-Mobility Server- The Mobility Server is a fully featured PBX.
-Distributed Resource Controller- the distributed resource controller (DRC) is a scalable, robust resource controller written in distributed Erlang and running on Windows-NT.