Origins of C

C is a general-purpose, high-level, compiled programming language. Dennis Ritchie developed C in the early 1970s for use with the UNIX operating system running on the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 computers at the BELL Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The UNIX operating system, most of the utility programs, and the C compiler itself were written in C. (C is sometimes erroneously thought to be inseparable from UNIX.)

Many of the important ideas of C originally came from the language BCPL, developed by Martin Richards. The influence of BCPL on C came indirectly through the language B, which Ken Thompson wrote in 1970 for the very first UNIX system, a DEC PDP-7. By 1972 B had evolved into C. (The original source code of the very first C compiler has been released into the public domain on the Internet at .)

For a long time C was...