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IIRC, back in the day, there was the original DAO. They released this very large contract, citing "the code is the law".

The code had a bug, and someone drained the $50M or so contract.

Since everyone lost a bunch of money, the majority agreed to fork Ethereum and roll back the hack, leading to "Ethereum" (with the roll back), and "Ethereum Classic" (without the rollback).

It was The DAO hack [1].

[1] https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao

A good overview can be found on the Wikipedia page for Ethereum Classic. ETHC is made up of the users and miners who didn't want to "claw-back" those funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic

Here's the wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao