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Comment by vatys | Hacker News Reader

> The Bell System standard was an extremely high Erlang number

I wasn't aware of erlang the unit (measuring telephone circuit load) and at first thought this had something to do with the language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)

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Well, they are related in that they are both telephony related: the language was an internal Ericsson language for building fast switches and such devices. I am always surprised (though I shouldn’t be) when I see it mentioned in a non-telecom context.

Someone must have felt very clever when they concluded Erlang would be dimensionless.

  Calls per second X seconds per call = no unit.

But that's wrong. Clearly the number of calls ongoing maps on to lines being used for a circuit-switched network, or datagrams in flight, or whatever. Far from dimensionless.

  Call_starts per second X call.seconds per call_start = calls as the unit

Much more plausible, IMHO.

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