In 2003 I joined a startup building a horizontally scalable archive. You could add nodes to add capacity for storing data and metadata, and the system could tol

In 2003 I joined a startup building a horizontally scalable archive. You could add nodes to add capacity for storing data and metadata, and the system could tolerate up to a configured number of failures and carry on without loss of data or service. (This was not a general-purpose file system, it was for write-once/read-many objects.) We built the system in Java and C. The distribution layer was done completely in Java. It was only after the system was done that I discovered Erlang. I REALLY wish I had known about it earlier. Erlang solved so many of the problems we had to solve by ourselves.