C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s.
Ritchie developed C between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, building on earlier languages such as BCPL and B. C was designed to provide both high-level programming features and efficient access to machine-level operations. That balance made it especially useful for operating-system development.
Much of the Unix operating system was rewritten in C, helping the language spread beyond its original research environment. The first major book about C, The C Programming Language, was written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and published in 1978.
C became standardized through the American National Standards Institute and later the International Organization for Standardization. Its influence is visible in C++, Objective-C, Java, C#, and many other languages. The letter C reflects its position after B in the language family, rather than an abbreviation for “computer.”