Concurrency before Erlang
summary
Traces Ericsson’s pre‑Erlang work: experiments with Modula, Chill, Ada, AP‑163 and AREA Pascal, rapid prototypes built in Prolog and Lisp, and a VAX + Unix setup that controls a real switch for demos; discovers backtracking fails for telecom control and that dynamic processes and message passing solve it; converges on a functional‑style concurrent language with pattern matching, message passing, and an active/standby live code upgrade; an efficient implementation from SICS and a Prentice Hall book drive early adoption.
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:35Schedulers
- 3:44Dynamic processes
- 4:31PL type languages
- 6:17Interface modules
- 6:45Ericsson
- 10:07Pascal
- 10:30Process
- 11:07Requirement specification
- 12:05Rendezvous
- 12:31Mailbox
- 12:42Packages
- 13:39Process communication
- 14:17Fortran
- 14:39Parallelism
- 15:09Computer Science Lab
- 18:40Switch
- 21:41Experiments
- 23:16Results
- 24:12User groups
- 25:46Workshop
- 26:49No new language
- 28:48How Pascal got its name
- 29:39Pascal is a dog
- 30:00The old notebook
- 32:07The new paper
- 32:27World International Switching Symposium
- 36:06The Book
- 38:12Questions
- 41:42Crocodile Dundee
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