C Programming/History
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The field of computing as we know it today started in 1947 with three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories--William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen--and their groundbreaking invention of the transistor. In 1956, the first fully transistor-based computer, the TX-0, was completed at MIT. The first integrated circuit was created in 1958 by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments but, the first high-level programming language existed even before then.
In 1954, The Fortran project, named for it being the Formula Translator, began. Fortran begot Algol 58, the Algorithmic Language, in 1958. Algol 58 begot Algol 60 in 1960. Algol 60 begot CPL, the Combined Programming Language, in 1963. CPL begot BCPL, Basic CPL, in 1967. BCPL begot B in 1969. B begot C in 1971.
B was the first language in the C lineage directly. It was created by Ken Thompson. B at Bell Labs and was an interpreted language used in early internal versions of the UNIX operating system. Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, also of Bell Labs, improved B and called it NB. Further extensions to NB created its logical successor, C, a compiled language. Most of UNIX was then rewritten in NB and then C, which led to a more portable operating system.
The portability of UNIX was the main reason for the initial popularity of both UNIX and C. So rather than creating a new operating system for each new machine, system programmers could simply write the few system-dependent parts required for the machine, and write a C compiler for the new system. Since most of the system utilities were therefore written in C, it simply made sense to also write new utilities in that language.
