The C programming language was developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in the United States. Ritchie was looking for a way to create a high-level language that could be used to write operating systems and system software.
C was designed to be a low-level programming language that would provide the flexibility and control of assembly language while offering a higher level of abstraction. The language was influenced by other programming languages of the time, including BCPL and Algol.
The first version of C was developed on a DEC PDP-11 computer running the Unix operating system. In 1978, Ritchie and Brian Kernighan published “The C Programming Language,” a book that became a widely-used reference for programmers learning the language.
C quickly became popular for system programming, and its popularity continued to grow as the Unix operating system gained widespread use. The language was also used in the development of the first versions of the TCP/IP protocol, which laid the foundation for the modern internet.
In the 1980s, C became a popular language for application development on personal computers, with the release of the MS-DOS operating system and the development of the first versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Over the years, C has evolved and undergone several standardizations. The first ANSI C standard was published in 1989, followed by the ISO C standard in 1990. These standards helped to ensure that C code written on one platform would be portable to other platforms.
Today, C remains a widely-used programming language for system programming, embedded systems, and other low-level applications. It has also influenced the development of many other programming languages, including C++, Java, and Python.