C was developed by Dennis Retchie in 1972 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in U.S.A. C was derived from a Language known as BCPL which was evolved at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 60’s. BCPL was used to develop an operating system known as MULTICS for early multi-user time shared computers.
One of the aims of BCPL was to achieve efficiency in compiled code. Thus BCPL was defined such that a translator could produce efficient machine Language code. C being a successor of BCPL has a similar philosophy.
C Language has been defined so that it has the advantages of a high level language namely machine independence. At the same time it is concise, providing only the bare essentials required in a language so that a translator can translate it in to an efficient machine language code. Until 1978, C was confined to use within Bell Laboratories. In 1978, when Brian Kernighan and Ritchie published a description of the language, known as “k & rc” com- puter professionals got impressed with C’s many desirable features.
By mid 1980s, popularity of C became wide spread Numerous C Compiler were written for computers of all sizes.