History of C Language

C was developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (now a part of AT&T) in 1972. When Dennis Ritchie was trying to rewrite the code for UNIX operating system, C was born. He was considering to rewrite the system using the B language, Thompson's( Ken Thompson invented B programming language) simplified version of BCPL. The name of C was chosen simply as the next after B. So, C is an outgrowth of two earlier languages, called BCPL and B.

Earlier days, C was basically used within Bell Laboratories. In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Ritchie published a definitive description of the language. The Kernighan and Ritchie description is commonly referred to as "K&R C." After that, further development of C was began. By the mid 1980s, the popularity of C had become widespread. Numerous C compilers and interpreters had been written for computers of all sizes, and many commercial application programs had been developed. Many commercial software applications were started to re-written in C language.

Due to availability of various C compilers, minor incompatibilities were found between different implementations of the language. To stop this problem, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed a committee, X3J11, to establish a standard specification of C in 1983. In 1990, the ANSI C standard (with formatting changes) was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Later the different versions of C was introduced as C89, C99 etc. and the current standard for the C programming language is C18(published in June, 2018).