How an MS-DOS picklist problem in 1991 became std::bitset -- by the author who proposed it

I served on the original ISO C++ Standards Committee (J16) and proposed std::bitset. I recently wrote up the story of how it came to be -- starting from a memory-constrained MS-DOS application, through the early days of templates, and into C++98.

I also touch on the parallel story of bitstring, which became vector<bool> and eventually boost::dynamic_bitset.

https://freshsources.com/blog/files/0efc66caabe2cb443a6acae6aca0f707-0.html