About C

First appeared in 1972, 48 years ago

The C programming language came out of Bell Labs in the early 1970s. According to the Bell Labs paper The Development of the C Language by Dennis Ritchie, “The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment.” Originally, Ken Thompson, a Bell Labs employee, desired to make a programming language for the new Unix platform. Thompson modified the BCPL system language and created B. However, not many utilities were ever written in B due to its slow nature and inability to take advantage of PDP-11 features in the operating system. This led to Ritchie improving on B, and thus creating C.

By the middle of the 1970s, the C-based Unix was used in many projects within the Bell System as well as “a small group of research-oriented industrial, academic, and government organizations outside [Bell Labs]". In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published The C Programming Language, which would serve as the language reference until a formal standard was adopted.