Why did AT&T support the development of C++?
When I first developed C++, AT&T built systems of greater complexity and with greater reliability requirements than most organizations. Consequently, we had to influence the market and help set standards that meet our needs – or else we wouldn’t have the tools to build our systems. Left to itself “the industry” will create languages and tools for dealing with “average” problems. Similarly, teachers tend to focus on languages and tools that serve students and researchers well – even if they don’t scale to the most demanding tasks. At the time when I developed C++ – and before that when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed Unix and C – AT&T was probably the worlds largest civilian user of (and consumer of) software tools. Then, we probably used a wider range of systems – from the tiniest embedded processors to the largest supercomputers and data-processing systems. That put a premium on systems that were applicable in many technical cultures and on many platforms. C and C++ were des
