Erlang killer app?

[Ulf Wiger]

On 22 Jul 2002, Michael Williams wrote:

>In article <Pine.GSO.4.44.0207200005080.27746-100000@REDACTED>,
> etxuwig@REDACTED (Ulf Wiger) writes:
>|> I'm convinced that Erlang could be used to design some killer
>|> groupware.
>
>Lotus Notes is very popular - and expensive. I am sure that
>similar groupware written in Erlang could be a great hit. And
>Erlang would be very suitable, lots of concurrency and
>distribution in a network of machines which come and go. /mike

Personally, I've thought that the product to benchmark against
would be FirstClass, which is a BBS system designed as a robust
and fast client-server architecture. When I played with it, back
in 1995-96, a Mac 950 could support 100 concurrent users, and a
sufficiently powerful Windows NT box could serve 1000. It zipped
along just fine over a 2400 bps modem line, with concurrent file
downloads with resume functionality, message history tracking,
on-line chat, database interfaces, multi-server forwarding,
lots of security options, ...

...and it was a breeze to configure and never went down.
What's more, it didn't cost more than your average PC mail
package (much less for modem users.)

I don't know how far it's progressed since then, or if there are
better systems in the Open Source world. I thought Lotus Notes
was terrible by comparison: expensive, slow, and hard to
maintain.

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson Telecom AB, ATM Multiservice Networks