C++: The Making of a Standard by Chuck Allison

Bjarne Stroustrup, a Dane with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (England), had used the Simula language for distributed systems simulations in his research. He was disappointed with its poor performance, however, and in 1979 when his new employer, AT&T Bell Labs, said "Do something interesting,'' he decided to infuse the C language with some Simula features he had grown accustomed to -- most notably classes -- and thus "C with Classes'' was born. It caught on within AT&T, was dubbed C++, and then proceeded to become a support burden for its inventor.
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