BCPL was first implemented by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1967. BCPL was a response to difficulties with its predecessor, Cambridge Programming Language, later renamed Combined Programming Language (CPL), which was designed during the early 1960s. Richards created BCPL by "removing those features of the full language which make compilation difficult". The first compiler implementation, for the IBM 7094 under Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), was written while Richards was visiting Project MAC at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the spring of 1967. The language was first described in a paper presented to the 1969 Spring Joint Computer Conference.