There is a really great movie showcasing this [1].
«hello allan!»
by the way, Erlang was developed in order to allow massively multithreaded application to be written efficiently. i.e. it contains support for multiple threads, message exchange, distributed computation, soft-real-time operation at the syntax level. it's a pretty interesting language to hack on.
the language itself was developed at ericsson research labs in order to program embedded controllers in telephony-related equipment (switches and whatchanameit). I guess the video was part of the introductive material that was prob'ly used within ericsson when the language was brought in use outside of the research labs.
on a related note, it made me laugh my ass off. ^_^
ciao,
Domenico