You ever used auto_ptr?

In 1992, I was working on the Taligent project, probably the first major C++ operating system. (It failed.) I remember when the ARM came out---none of the compilers we had available could really do templates. Or namespaces.

A part of Taligent lives on with ROOT, which was very annoying.

Oh no... ROOT. It's a testament to the pure grit and gumption or thousands of poor undergraduates that particle physics can advance, with this. Eons ago, I tried several times to help my then-girlfriend (you know how it goes 'hey you have some kind of eng diploma'? Yes sw engineering... - Hu so you know C++? - nobody 'knows' C++ but I can manage 'so here what I'm trying to do, here are 3 other examples, please for the love of Wotan help') and I was baffled on how to do anything with it. I mean the core thing seems powerful enough, but trying to go out of the beaten path (research, right ?) was yugely frustrating... And I'd worked on 2 physics codebases or variable quality before. I didn't appear as competent as I'd hoped and spent so much time helping, reading docs and code without understanding much of the design. This is the codebase that started my deep defiance for OOP and especially OOP-as-a-mirror-of-the-real-world and inheritance-for-code-economy...

ok then, nobody was using auto_ptr in the 90s.

Oh boy, OWL, MFC and VCL were used in the 90s, with their ComPtr smart pointer for COM/ActiveX/OLE 2.0.

I worked with C++ & MFC in mid-late 1990s, smart pointers weren't an option. Maybe if you do something against MS oddball APIs, but not in general programming, not even for mainstream MFC uses. And what was there was entirely non-idiosyncartic, it's like claiming C++ had garbage collection in 1990s because you could bolt on Boehm's.