For me, coming from Turbo Pascal 3 - 6, it allowed me in 1993 to use a language with a similar level of safety and language features, instead of having to deal with PDP-11 constraints.

I was always the weird kid that asked the professors if I could deliver C projects written in C++ instead, which thankfully some of them did accept.

Specially given that at my degree, C was already out of fashion by the early 90's. First year students got to learn Pascal and C++, and were expected to learn C from their introduction to C++ programming.