Abstract This paper describes the development of the programming language Erlang during the period 1985-1997. Erlang is a concurrent programming language designed for programming large-scale distributed soft real-time control applications. The design of Erlang was heavily influenced by ideas from the logic and functional programming communities. Other sources of inspiration came from languages such as Chill and Ada which are used in industry for programming control systems. 1 Introduction This paper describes the development of the Erlang programming language. Erlang is a language which draws heavily from various traditions in the logic, functional and realtime control programming communities. Our goal was to make a language which could be used for building large soft real-time control systems. By large I mean systems with possibly millions of lines of code. By a soft real-time system I mean a system which does not fail catastrophically if a real-time deadline is missed.