The Rise of C++

Stroustrup received his PhD from the University of Aarhus in 1979, and joined the famed 1127 Computing Science Research Center, the birthplace of Unix and C, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. The open, flexible research atmosphere encouraged him to consider adapting concepts from Simula, which he had used in his PhD thesis work, to C. He is quoted as saying, “When I joined, I was basically told to do something interesting...”[3]

After AT&T split up in 1996 into AT&T and Lucent, Stroustrup stayed with AT&T and was a founding member of AT&T Labs, where he was the head of the Large-Scale Programming Research Department until 2002. He then moved to the computer science department of Texas A&M. He is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University and a managing director in the Technology Division of Morgan Stanley.

During the three decades since the release of C++, Stroustrup has published more than 100 papers related to C++ and several books on C++, which have been translated into multiple languages. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, including the ACM’s Grace Hopper Award, election to the National Academy of Engineering, IEEE Fellow, Bell Labs Fellow and AT&T Fellow.