In the 1960s, California University, General Electric, and AT&T’s Bell Labs began working together on a common project known as the Multics operating system (OS).
However, over time, disagreements arose between these organizations, leading them to separate from the project. The team at AT&T’s Bell Labs, led by Ken Thompson, began to question why they were no longer part of the Multics project, and they set out to create their own operating system.
Ken Thompson and his team first considered the best programming language for creating an OS. At that time, a new language called BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), developed by Martin Richards in 1966, was gaining attention.
Thompson initially chose BCPL but soon realized there were some limitations to using it for operating system development. As a result, he decided to create a new language based on BCPL, which became known as the B language. B was essentially an improved version of BCPL, and its name was chosen in honor of Martin Richards.
In 1969, Ken Thompson and his team began using the B language to develop a new operating system, which they called UNIX. However, the original version of UNIX was hardware-dependent, which meant it could only run on specific hardware.
Dennis Ritchie, another member of the Bell Labs team, saw the potential to make UNIX more portable and hardware-independent. He made improvements to the B language, which led to the creation of the C programming language in 1972. Like the B language, C has no full form—it was simply named after the second letter of BCPL, as a tribute to Richards’ work.
Using C, the Bell Labs team rewrote UNIX, making it much more portable and hardware-independent. This development marked a pivotal moment in the history of computing and the beginning of what many consider the “golden era” of technology.