What is C Language’s history?

The C language was developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 at AT&T Bell Labs.

For many years, the de facto standard for the C programming language was the K&R standard because of the book The C Programming Language, written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie in 1978. However, there were many changes unofficially made to the C language that were not presented in the K&R standard.

Fearing that C might lose its portability, a group of compiler vendors and software developers petitioned the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to build a standard for the C language in 1983. ANSI approved the application and formed the X3J11 Technical Committee to work on the C standard. By the end of 1989, the committee approved the ANSI standard for the C programming language.

The ANSI standard for C enhances the K&R standard and defines a group of commonly used C functions that are expected to be found in the ANSI C standard library. Now, all C compilers have the standard library, along with some other compiler-specific functions.