C History

C History

• C is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie that used the Unix Operating system between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs.

• C is the result of a development process that started with an older language called BCPL.

• BCPL was developed by Martin Richards, and it influenced a language called B, which was invented by Ken Thompson.

• In the summer of 1983 a committee was established to create an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard that would define the C language.

• The standardization process took six years (much longer than anyone reasonably expected).

• The ANSI C standard was finally adopted in December 1989, with the first copies becoming available in early 1990.

• The standard was also adopted by ISO (International Standards Organization), and the resulting standard was typically referred to as ANSI/ISO Standard C.

• Many later languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from C, including C#, D, Go, Java, JavaScript, Limbo, LPC, Perl, PHP, Python, and Unix's C shell.