The general-purpose programming language C is potent and has been used for many years. It has established itself as a very popular language, especially in systems programming, where low-level hardware control is crucial. A lot of other languages have been affected by it and are still extensively used now.

The beginning of C’s history may be found in the early 1970s, when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, along with a group of Bell Labs programmers, set out to design a new language that would be useful for developing operating systems for the PDP-11 computer. They found FORTRAN and COBOL, which were created for scientific and business applications, respectively, to be unsatisfactory because they lacked the features required for systems programming.

Based on Thompson’s older language known as “Bon,” the first iteration of C, termed “B,” was created. Unfortunately, it was challenging to utilise for big projects and lacked several crucial capabilities like data types and structures. In an effort to outdo “B,” Ritchie developed C, which had these capabilities as well as many additional ones including pointers, arrays, and functions.

Particularly in the Unix community, where it was used to create many of the operating system’s utilities and tools, C quickly gained popularity among developers. As more and more programs—including databases, interpreters, and compilers—were developed in C, it gained popularity.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established a group in 1983 to create ANSI C or C89, a standardised version of the C programming language. This standardisation made it possible to write portable, platform-independent C programmes. The ANSI C standard was accepted as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1990 and is now known as ISO/IEC 9899:1990.

C++, Java, Python, and Ruby are just a few of the programming languages that C has impacted throughout the years. Their syntax, semantics, and features are influenced by it. C is renowned for its low-level hardware control, which makes it perfect for operating systems, embedded systems, and systems programming.