Personally, I think C deserves mention, not because it became THE portable language after 8 x n-bit implementations became standard, but rather, it was the firs

Personally, I think C deserves mention, not because it became THE portable language after 8 x n-bit implementations became standard, but rather, it was the first neutral, agnostic language about control structures (for, while, and do .. until) and argument-passing methods (call by name, value, reference, ...), and block-terminating methds (begin .. end? Begin ... End.? no, {}=;) and it buried all the idiotic academic flame wars claiming one of each choice was THE ONLY "right" way to build a programming language. C was also the first language to popularize access to nearly the entire instruction set of a machine with it's rich set of operators. C++ DOES NOT deserve mention because it once again tried to "force" programmers to follow "the one true way" to write object oriented programs, by outlawing a number of useful programming constructs that Stroustroup judged unworthy (such as consts without storage in base classes, which could not be subclassed so he nuked them even though they are useful, e.g. for the gravitational constant etc.)