"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.
"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.
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!
And it was a pun by Ericsson engineers, as they used Erlang to program telephone switches where the capacity planing included Erlangs.
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.
I believe it's both.
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...
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
also the namesake of the unit fwiw
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm
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.
Thanks for the rabbit hole!