C was developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
The development of C was closely tied to the development of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs.
Historically, operating systems were typically written in Assembly language and without portability in mind.
During the development of Unix, there was a need for a more efficient and portable programming language for writing operating systems.
Dennis Ritchie went on to create a language called B, which was an evolution from an earlier language called BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language).
It aimed to bridge the gap between the low-level capabilities of Assembly and the high-level languages used at the time, such as Fortran.
B was not powerful enough to support Unix development, so Dennis Ritchie developed a new language that took inspiration from B and BCPL and had some additional features. He named this language C.
C’s simple design, speed, efficiency, performance, and close relationship with a computer’s hardware made it an attractive choice for systems programming. This led to the Unix operating system being rewritten in C.
