The History of the C Language
In the 1960s Ritchie worked, with several other employees of Bell Labs (AT&T), on a project called Multics. The goal of the project was to develop an operating system for a large computer that could be used by a thousand users. In 1969 AT&T (Bell Labs) withdrew from the project, because the project could not produce an economically useful system. So the employees of Bell Labs (AT&T) had to search for another project to work on (mainly Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson).
Ken Thompson began to work on the development of a new file system. He wrote, a version of the new file system for the DEC PDP-7, in assembler. (The new file system was also used for the game Space Travel). Soon they began to make improvements and add expansions. (They used there knowledge from the Multics project to add improvements). After a while a complete system was born. Brian W. Kernighan called the system UNIX, a sarcastic reference to Multics. The whole system was still written in assembly code.
Besides assembler and Fortran, UNIX also had an interpreter for the programming language B. ( The B language is derived directly from Martin Richards BCPL). The language B was developed in 1969-70 by Ken Thompson. In the early days computer code was written in assembly code. To perform a specific task, you had to write many pages of code. A high-level language like B made it possible to write the same task in just a few lines of code. The language B was used for further development of the UNIX system. Because of the high-level of the B language, code could be produced much faster, then in assembly.
