AT&T made UNIX source code available to a few American universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie...
Some of those students tried their way into the recent workstation market using what they knew from their university. Sun was such case.
Back in those days we payed for development tools, so everyone used to stick with what the OS vendors had, why shell out money for another language that implied the extra effort of writing bindings.
So like the mobile and browser space nowadays, C as the UNIX language was the way to go.
Meanwhile, those university students and professional coders with access to UNIX at the university and work, wanted to be able to take work home.
So C dialects that where able to be used in the tiny home computers started to be developed and distributed over code listing in magazines, books and BBS.
When UNIX eventually took over the mainframes market, C got into the same spot like JavaScript in the browser.
The other languages, just like any systems programming language had their OSes, but they failed against UNIX. And as I mentioned before back then you needed a very good reason to convince someone to pay extra for compilers that weren't part of the OS SDK.
Unix was insanely successful in its day: an indication is that when Richard M. Stallman decided to create a Free Software operating system in 1984, he chose to call it "GNU" for "GNU's Not Unix".
Some of those students tried their way into the recent workstation market using what they knew from their university. Sun was such case.
Back in those days we payed for development tools, so everyone used to stick with what the OS vendors had, why shell out money for another language that implied the extra effort of writing bindings.
So like the mobile and browser space nowadays, C as the UNIX language was the way to go.
Meanwhile, those university students and professional coders with access to UNIX at the university and work, wanted to be able to take work home.
So C dialects that where able to be used in the tiny home computers started to be developed and distributed over code listing in magazines, books and BBS.
When UNIX eventually took over the mainframes market, C got into the same spot like JavaScript in the browser.
The other languages, just like any systems programming language had their OSes, but they failed against UNIX. And as I mentioned before back then you needed a very good reason to convince someone to pay extra for compilers that weren't part of the OS SDK.