A Brief History of C
C is a general-purpose language which has been closely associated with the
UNIX operating system for which it was developed - since the system and most of the programs that run it are written in C.
Many of the important ideas of C stem from the language
BCPL, developed by Martin Richards. The influence of BCPL on C proceeded indirectly through the language
B, which was written by Ken Thompson in 1970 at Bell Labs, for the first UNIX system on a
DEC PDP-7.
BCPL and
B are "type less" languages whereas C provides a variety of data types.
In 1972 Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs writes C and in 1978 the publication of The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie caused a revolution in the computing world.
In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established a committee to provide a modern, comprehensive definition of C. The resulting definition, the ANSI standard, or "ANSI C", was completed late 1988.
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Dennis Ritchie
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The History Of C Language
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s by Dennis M. Ritchie an employee from Bell Labs (AT&T).
In the 1960s Ritchie worked, with several other employees of Bell Labs (AT&T), on a project called Multics. The goal of the project was to develop an operating system for a large computer that could be used by a thousand users. In 1969 AT&T (Bell Labs) withdrew from the project, because the project could not produce an economically useful system. So the employees of Bell Labs (AT&T) had to search for another project to work on (mainly Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson).
Ken Thompson began to work on the development of a new file system. After a while a complete system was born. Brian W. Kernighan called the system UNIX, a sarcastic reference to Multics. The whole system was still written in assembly code.
UNIX had an interpreter for the programming language B. ( The B language is derived directly from Martin Richards BCPL). The language B was developed in 1969-70 by Ken Thompson. In the early days computer code was written in assembly code. To perform a specific task, you had to write many pages of code. A high-level language like B made it possible to write the same task in just a few lines of code. The language B was used for further development of the UNIX system. Because of the high-level of the B language, code could be produced much faster, then in assembly.
A drawback of the B language was that it did not know data-types. (Everything was expressed in machine words). Another functionality that the B language did not provide was the use of “structures”. The lag of these things formed the reason for Dennis M. Ritchie to develop the programming language C. So in 1971-73 Dennis M. Ritchie turned the B language into the C language, keeping most of the language B syntax while adding data-types and many other changes. The C language had a powerful mix of high-level functionality and the detailed features required to program an operating system. Therefore many of the UNIX components were eventually rewritten in C (the Unix kernel itself was rewritten in 1973 on a DEC PDP-11).
The programming language C was written down, by Kernighan and Ritchie, in a now classic book called “The C Programming Language, 1st edition”.
For years the book “The C Programming Language, 1st edition” was the standard on the language C. In 1983 a committee was formed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
to develop a modern definition for the programming language C (ANSI X3J11). In 1988 they delivered the final standard definition ANSI C.
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