Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

The C Programming Language

C was developed at Bell Laboratories by two men named Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. In 1972, Bell Laboratories needed to write a new operating system. Until that point, most operating systems were written in assembler language because the high-level programming languages were not efficient enough, given the lack of computer power at that time. The problem with the low-level programming of assembler language is that the code is difficult to maintain. As the operating systems were updated, programmers dreaded the nightmares that updating assembler code brought.

Bell did not want its new operating system to be as difficult to maintain as previous ones were, but there was simply no high-level language at the time ...