alt Hacker NewsAh yes, computing luminary Larry Tesler, what an idiot, working at Xerox PARC. Whoof.
Decades is an exaggeration. It was less than a decade after Digital started using Control-C as a process interrupt in their PDP-10 operating systems (1967) to when Mr Tesler devised his mapping to a copy operation (1974-1976) for Smalltalk-76, and only four years after C was born. CP/M is the much more likely source of widespread usage of control-C as an interrupt, and it was contemporaneous (1974) with Tesler’s mapping.
But they weren’t combined on the same system until decades later, after Windows became nearly ubiquitous and Linux systems started copying things from it.