C: Introduction

C is a popular general-purpose programming language created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs between the years 1969 and 1973. It was originally written for the DEC PDP-11 system that run the UNIX operating system.

C was influenced by the programming language B, developed by Ken Thompson - one of the principal creators of Unix - in 1970 at Bell Labs for non-numeric computations. B in turn is a remniscent of the earlier programming language called BCPL, a simple typeless language, designed by Martin Richards in 1966 at the University of Cambridge.

Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie (right). Public Domain

In 1978, Brian Kernighan along with Dennis Ritchie published the well-known tutorial on the language called The C Programming Language.