History of C language
In 1965, Bell Telephone Laboratories, General Electric Company and Massachusetts Institute of Technology where working together to develop a new operating system called MULTICS.
In 1969, Bell Laboratories ended its participation in the project. However, the participating members of Bell Labs, mainly Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, still had an intention to create such kind of an OS which finally matured into UNIX operating system.
After it early success in 1970, Ken Thompson set out to implement a FORTRAN compiler for the new system, but instead came up with the language B. B Language was influenced by Richard Martins BCPL language which was type-less and interpretive. Hence, both BCPL and B language had some performance drawbacks.
In 1972, in an effort to add “types” and definition of data structures to B language and use compiler instead of interpreter, Dennis Ritchie came up with a new B language called C language.
Just like natural languages, programming languages also change. The original specification of the C language (as devised by Dennis Richie) together with close variations is sometimes known as Old-style C or Traditional C. However, in 1988 ANSI (American National Standards Institute) published a new specification of the language which has become an international standard which is accepted by all compilers. It is known as ANSI C. ANSI C is mostly a superset (i.e. provides additional functionality) over Old-style C.
