The Development of the C Language* Dennis M. Ritchie Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA dmr@bell-labs.com ABSTRACT 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 progr