History of C/C++
Development of C
UNIX developed c. 1969 – DEC PDP-7 Assembly Language
BCPL – a user friendly OS providing powerful development tools developed from BCPL. Assembler tedious long and error prone.
A new language “B” a second attempt. C. 1970
A totally new language “C” a successor to “B”. C. 1971
By 1973 UNIX OS almost totally written in “C”
The C++ Programming Language is basically an extension of the C Programming Language. The C Programming language was developed from 1969-1973 at Bell labs, at the same time the UNIX operating system was being developed there. C was a direct descendant of the language B, which was developed by Ken Thompson as a systems programming language for the fledgling UNIX operating system. B, in turn, descended from the language BCPL which was designed in the 1960s by Martin Richards while at MIT.
In 1971 Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs extended the B language (by adding types) into what he called NB, for "New B". Ritchie credits some of his changes to language constructs found in Algol68, although he states "although it [the type scheme], perhaps, did not emerge in a form that Algol's adherents would approve of" After restructuring the language and rewriting the compiler for B, Ritchie gave his new language a name: "C".