Lambda the Ultimate

C's ancestry is well known: CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C. BCPL was a success in it's own right, and is well documented. But what was CPL? Until recently, there was almost no information on it on the web (apart from some folkore) . However, a couple of papers on it:
'The main features of CPL' (Barron et al, 1963) and 'The London CPL1 compiler' (Coulouris et al, 1968) are now available due to the recent opening of the older part of Computer Journal's archives.

As well as being an ancestor of C, CPL is interesting as being perhaps the first language widely castigated as 'too big'.