Exactly, C only became widely adopted by the industry thanks to AT&T only being allowed to charge a symbolic price for UNIX and making the source code available to universities.

Which 80's startups like Sun and SGI used as basis for their workstation OSes.

Bjarne created C++, because after having to use BCPL instead of Simula to finish his PhD, he never wanted to work like that ever again.

So C with Classes started as a tool for Bjarne to target C, while staying productive and able to write safer code.