department at Unix System Laboratories, which was responsible for the C language compiler and development tools used to build Unix. Moreover, it was responsible for commercial sales related to the C++ language, including development tools such as the Cfront compiler that had come from AT&T. Indeed, the paper describing one of the first implementations of automatic instantiation of C++ templates in a C++ compiler had as lead author an engineer associated with Unix System Laboratories. And Margaret A. Ellis, co-author with C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup of The Annotated C++ Reference Manual, an important publication in the history of the language, was a USL software engineer. USL also continued the development of, and attempted to market, C++ Standard Components, an early instance of a C++ software foundation library that supported container classes and various other computer science-based functionality such as finite-state machines, graphs, and regular expressions. The Standard Components originated in conjunction with early developments in the C++ language in Bell Labs and became widely used internally within AT&T, by one estimate being used in hundreds of projects. They represented an effort among early library writers there to design reusable code using C++ idioms. Unlike its other offerings, which were sold to OEM vendors and resellers, here USL sold to end users. The initial release of USL C++ Standard Components to the general computing industry was labelled as Release 2.0 and occurred in 1991; it suffered from an awkward mechanism to get around the lack of templates in the container classes. That was followed by Release 3.0, which added support for templates, in 1992. Some within USL believed that C++ Standard Components could become a language standard as well as a significant source of revenue, but it had trouble gaining traction outside of AT&T. Stroustrup would later describe these goals as "a misguided belief". In any case, all such libraries were soon eclipsed by the radically different Standard Template Library (STL), which became the standardized foundation library for the C++ language. As it happens, one of the Standard Components, array_alg, was designed by the creator of STL, Alex Stepanov, and can be considered an early predecessor of STL. Partial spinoff from AT&T In April 1991, USL became partly independent of AT&T when about 22 percent of it, worth about $65 million, was sold to eleven outside computer vendors: Amdahl, Motorola, Novell, Sun, ICL, Olivetti, Fujitsu, NEC, OKI Electric, Toshiba, and the