Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was a computer scientist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In his own history of the language, “The Development of the C Language,” he describes how C “came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system.” He wrote that the most creative period of the language’s development occurred during 1972.
Ritchie designed C as the implementation language for the young Unix system. In his account, he explains that C was derived from the typeless language BCPL and evolved a type structure, growing up on the small DEC PDP-11 machine on which Unix and C first became popular. Working alongside Ken Thompson, who led the early Unix effort, Ritchie helped turn an experimental operating system into one written largely in a portable high-level language.
His firsthand history also records that the language was later “officially standardized,” and that the reference description most programmers used was the book he wrote with Brian Kernighan, commonly called “K&R.” That book and the language it described shaped how a generation of systems programmers learned to write software.
Through C and Unix, Ritchie’s work underpins a large share of the software written since. C remains one of the most influential programming languages ever created, and many later languages borrow its syntax and ideas directly.