What does Beam have to do with Erlang?

[AstonJ]

BEAM is the Erlang Virtual Machine which Elixir, Erlang and all BEAM languages run on

See this for more:

History of the BEAM Compiler

Before BEAM there was JAM (Joe’s Abstract Machine). BEAM and JAM were used alongside each other from the early versions of OTP up to and including OTP R5C. Robert also had his own virtual machine called VEE (Virding’s Erlang Engine). The following blog post from the OTP blog gives some more details about the early implementations of Erlang: A Brief History of the BEAM Compiler