Return to CPP Bell Laboratories, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, Unix, Plan 9 Operating System, C Programming Language, C++, History of the Computer, History of Programming Languages, Xerox PARC

In 1972, Dennis Ritchie developed the compiled programming language C as a replacement for the interpreted language B which was then used in a worse is better rewrite of UNIX. Also, the language AWK was designed and implemented by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan of Bell Laboratories. Also in 1972, Marc Rochkind invented the Source Code Control System (see Version control - Source control).

In 1985, the programming language C++ had its first commercial release. Bjarne Stroustrup started developing C Plus Plus C++ at Bell Laboratories in 1979 as a language extension to the original C language.

“The evolution of CPP was always in the context of its use. I spent a lot of time listening to CPP users, seeking out the opinions of experienced CPP programmers, and of course writing CPP code. In particular, my colleagues at CPP AT&T Bell Laboratories were essential for the growth of CPP during its first decade.” (TrCppBS 2022)

Snippet from Wikipedia: Bell Labs

Bell Labs is an American industrial research and development (R&D) company credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.

The laboratory began in the late 19th century as the Western Electric Engineering Department, located at 463 West Street in New York City. After years of conducting research and development under Western Electric, a Bell subsidiary, the Engineering Department was reformed into Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925 and placed under the shared ownership of Western Electric and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). In the 1960s, laboratory and company headquarters were moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984 after the Bell System was broken up. After the breakup, its funding greatly declined.

In 1996, AT&T Technologies was spun off and renamed to Lucent Technologies, who used the Murray Hill site as their headquarters. Bell Laboratories was split as well, with part of it going to AT&T as AT&T Laboratories. In 2006, Lucent merged with Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent, which was in turn acquired by Nokia in 2016.

Its alumni include people like William Shockley, Dennis Ritchie, Claude Shannon and Willard Boyle.

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