C++ development began in 1979 when Bjarne Stroustrup was working on his PhD thesis using the Simula language. He identified opportunities to incorporate object-oriented programming features into software development. Stroustrup started adding OOP features to the C language while maintaining C's core functionality. This resulted in C++, which included classes, inheritance, and other features to support OOP while keeping C compatible. C++ became popular as an extension of C that provided object-oriented capabilities.