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Animats 5 days ago

"5000 Erlangs" - oh, they meant 5000 instances of some Erlang interpreter. Not Erlang as a unit of measure.[1] One voice call for one hour is one Erlang.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)

QuantumNomad_ 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Neat! I always thought the name of the Erlang programming language just meant “Ericsson Language”, since this programming language was invented for Ericsson. Never knew there was anything more than that to the name!

RF_Savage 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

And it was a pun by Ericsson engineers, as they used Erlang to program telephone switches where the capacity planing included Erlangs.

lawik 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

According to Robert Virding at an unnamed bar in Berlin ~3 years ago they just wanted to be like Pascal in terms of picking a mathematician. But Ericsson Language certainly helped sell it internally, I'm sure.

cmrdporcupine 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe it's both.

RossBencina 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I believe it's neither:

"The origin of queueing theory dates back to 1909, when Agner Krarup Erlang (1878–1929) published his fundamental paper on congestion in telephone traffic [for a brief account, see Saaty (1957), and for details on his life and work, see Brockmeyer et al. (1948)]." -- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/queueing-th...

Animats 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the early days of telephony, system load was measured by how much current was being drawn from the talk power supply. This was done with a watt-hour meter, calibrated in erlangs.[1]

(It's amazing how little logging went on in the phone system before computerized switching. But that's another subject.)

[1] https://physicsmuseum.uq.edu.au/erlangmeter

0x69420 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

also the namesake of the unit fwiw

5 days ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
robocat 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What does 5000 Animats measure?

Does 1 Animat convert to metric nitpicks?

You know you're successful once you're added to: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

jacquesm 5 days ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm

lawik 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was aware an Erlang being a unit though I'd forgotten what it measured. I Need to have my fun when giving titles to these things. Hope it fell within bearable tolerances.

bravesoul2 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for the rabbit hole!