GoKawiilC++ History Collection
Paul McJones, editor
http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/
Last updated 13 January 2026
Abstract
Contents
Chronology
Sources: "C++ Timeline", D&E, page 4; HOPL-III paper.
1979 April Work on C with Classes began 1979 October First C with Classes (Cpre) running 1983 August First C++ in use at Bell Labs 1984 C++ named 1985 February Cfront Release E (first external C++ release) 1985 October Cfront Release 1.0 (first commercial release) The C++ Programming Language 1986 First commercial Cfront PC port (Cfront 1.1, Glockenspiel) 1987 February Cfront Release 1.2 1987 December First GNU C++ release (1.13) 1988 First Oregon Software C++ release [announcement]; first Zortech C++ release 1989 June Cfront Release 2.0 1989 The Annotated C++ Reference Manual; ANSI C++ committee (J16) founded (Washington, DC) 1990 First ANSI X3J16 technical meeting (Somerset, NJ) [see group photograph, courtesy of Andrew Koenig]; templates accepted (Seattle, WA); exceptions accepted (Palo Alto, CA); first Borland C++ release 1991 First ISO WG21 meeting (Lund, Sweden); Cfront Release 3.0 (including templates); The C++ Programming Language (2nd edition) 1992 First IBM, DEC, and Microsoft C++ releases 1993 Run-time type identification accepted (Portland, Oregon); namespaces and string (templatized by character type) accepted (Munich, Germany); A History of C++: 1979-1991 published at HOPL2 1994 string (templatized by character type) (San Diego, California); the STL accepted (San Diego, CA and Waterloo, Canada) 1996 export accepted (Stockholm, Sweden) 1997 Final committee vote on the complete standard (Morristown, New Jersey) 1998 ISO C++ standard ratified 2003 Technical Corrigendum; work on C++0x started 2004 Performance technical report; Library technical report (hash tables, regular expressions, smart pointers, etc.) 2005 First votes on features for C++0x (Lillehammer, Norway); auto , static_assert , and rvalue references accepted in principle 2006 First full committee (official) votes on features for C++0x (Berlin, Germany)
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