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I understand that the acronym for Erlang's virtual machine, BEAM, stands for "Bogdan/Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine".

But I can't find definitive reference anywhere to exactly who Bogdan and Björn are.

Searching the erlang.org mailing list I do see posts by developers named "Bogdan Andu" and "Björn-Egil Dahlberg". Can anyone confirm, are these the engineers that BEAM is named after?

seanomlor
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    Interesting, but not really on-topic. – Andrew May 07 '16 at 23:17
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    AFAIK Björn = [Björn Gustavsson](http://www.erlang.se/~bjorn/) and Bogdan = [Bogumil Hausman](http://www.cs-lab.org/historical_beam_instruction_set.html). There's a [reference](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/1999-June/000368.html) indicating the latter on the erlang-questions mailing list. Both were employees at Ericsson at some time. – jpw May 07 '16 at 23:42
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not about programming at all. – David Ferenczy Rogožan May 07 '16 at 23:56
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    Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman and Björn Gustavsson are correct. – RichardC May 08 '16 at 19:17
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    Favorited this question. I think it can belong here. You should know the history behind the software you use. – Vans S Jun 06 '16 at 02:50

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Erlang and OTP in Action on page 17 says that BEAM means Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine. Also see this errata - scroll down to page 41. Here is the history of the Erlang VM - BEAM was not the first and only VM capable of executing Erlang code! Bogdan is actually an English version of Bogumil. All those names are employees at Ericsson who worked on implementing the language and its execution environment after Joe Armstrong's initial implementation in Prolog.

Greg
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