Ericsson is a Swedish multinational telecommunications company and one of the world’s oldest technology companies. Its internal research lab created Erlang, a programming language that revolutionized how distributed, fault-tolerant systems are built.
Erlang Development
Ericsson’s Computer Science Laboratory developed Erlang in the 1980s to handle telephone switching systems. The language’s requirements—extreme reliability, concurrent processing, and zero-downtime updates—came directly from telecom needs.
Open Source Release
In 1998, Ericsson open-sourced Erlang after initially trying to restrict its use internally. This decision allowed Erlang to spread beyond telecommunications and influence the broader software industry.
Infrastructure Impact
Ericsson’s work on Erlang and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP) established patterns for building reliable distributed systems that influenced:
- Modern messaging systems (WhatsApp, Discord)
- Database systems (CouchDB, Riak)
- Cloud infrastructure design patterns
- The Elixir programming language
Continued Development
Ericsson continues to support Erlang development and uses it in its telecommunications infrastructure, maintaining one of the largest Erlang codebases in the world.