"MFC was introduced in 1992 with Microsoft's C/C++ 7.0 compiler for use with 16-bit versions of Windows as an extremely thin object-oriented C++ wrapper for the Windows API."
Thinness is probably in the eye of the beholder, but as one of the many MFC victims back in the day, I found using MFC to be endlessly frustrating because it added a layer of complexity and pain to Win32 programming without giving me anything I really wanted back in compensation - you still needed to work directly with arcane Win32 mechanisms to do simple things, like, change the background color of a window for example. Admittedly there was some (less thin) Document/View model stuff thrown in there, but the impression I got was that this was an afterthought bolted on the side.
In contrast, Qt and wxWidgets for example are toolkits that are designed to make a programmer's life easier by providing a genuinely convenient abstraction of a Windowed GUI.
My perception on MFC is that it was neither thin, nor particularly well thought out. It felt like something Microsoft started developing for internal use and that they decided to turn it into a product for developers, with all sort of idiosyncratic oddities that make perfect sense when you are Microsoft and none to anyone else.
