title: What is an Erlang node?
body: <p>I see a definition in one of books about Erlang:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>A node is a self-contained Erlang system containing a
    complete virtual machine with its own address space and own set of
    processes.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>But this raises more questions to me. </p>
  
  <p>What is a self-contained Erlang system?</p>
  
  <p>As an example, do I spawn a new node by going to terminal and running <code>erl shell</code>? Do I open multiple nodes by opening multiple terminals and running <code>erl shell</code> in each?</p>
  
  <p>Are shells opened like above anyhow relate to each other or are they completely isolated by default? If these are different nodes, then do I treat this approach as distributed programming and should dig deeper in that topic in case I want to run and stop processes independently but then connect them?</p>