ORIGIN OF ‘C’

Perhaps each one of us is well acquainted with the importance of 'C' as a programming language in the computer world. 'C' was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system on the DEC PDP-11, by Dennis Ritchie. It has been called the 'System Programming Language' due to it's great deal of utility found in  designing programs for compilers and operating systems along with other big programs as well!

‘C’ holds it’s many of the important ideas from the language BCPL, developed by Martin Richards which in turn holds it’s roots in the language B, which was written by Ken

Thompson in 1970 for the first UNIX system on the DEC PDP-7. These led to the development of C in the 1970s.

For quite long, the standard for C was the version supplied with the Unix

version 5 operating system. It was first explained in The C Programming Language by

Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978). In 1983 a committee was established to create an ANSI (American National

Standards Institute) standard that would define the C language once and for all. The

standardization process took six years (much longer than expected).

The ANSI C standard was finally adopted in December 1989, with the first copies

launched in early 1990. The standard was also adopted by ISO (International

Standards Organization) and is now referred to as the ANSI/ISO C standard. Today, all mainstream C/C++ compilers comply with Standard C.