The Development of the C Language by Dennis M. Ritchie The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution. http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/chist.html