Hacker News Reader

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...

also the namesake of the unit fwiw

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