History of C Programming Language

Before we can begin to write serious programs, it would be interesting to know the history of C language. Here we are going to discuss a brief history of c programming language.

C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system on the DEC PDP-11, by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1972 at Bell Laboratories of AT & T (American Telephone & Telegraph), located in the U.S.A.

In the late seventies, C began to replace the more familiar languages of that time like PL/I, ALGOL, etc. No one pushed C. It wasn’t made the ‘official’ Bell Labs language. Thus, without any advertisement, C’s reputation spread and its pool of users grew. Dennis Ritchie seems to have been rather surprised that so many programmers preferred C to older languages like FORTRAN or PL/I, or the newer ones like Pascal and APL, but surprisingly c became a popular programming language.



Let’s see the programming languages that were developed before C.