In November 2002, Joe Armstrong, one of the Erlang fathers, gave an invited talk at the Lightweight Languages Workshop (LL2), organized by the MIT.
The talk was titled “Concurrency Oriented Programming in Erlang”, and the video is still available in .ram format. The slides can also be downloaded from the web page.
I think that watching the talk -which is still very fresh almost 4 years later- is a really interesting way of learning more about the Erlang approach for programming complex distributed control systems.
Some years ago, during my stay at the Ericsson CSLab, I learnt from Joe that the key feature of Erlang was not being a functional language but being a distributed one, meaning by distributed that the concurrency model was built-in as a basic part of the language. In the talk, this concept is developed with all the detail.