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by groovy2shoes
2168 days ago
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They don't say that C was the first. The claim is that C's influence was responsible for the proliferation. (Bit of a tangent: Lisp predates C by at most 2 years if you count McCarthy's original 1960 paper, but afaict their respective implementations both got their first public distribution in 1962. Of course, Lisp was set to gain momentum from that time until the AI winter, while C was practically confined to UNIX until the 80s...) |
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In early computing, assembly language saw a lot of use. The navigation program that sent the Apollo mission to the Moon was written in assembly language. During the micro-computer boom, which echoed the history of big iron boom, a lot of applications and systems were written in assembly language again. Most commercial video games for 8 bit micros were written in assembly language. The famous WordPerfect word processor for the IBM PC was assembly language. The VMS operating system: assembly language.
C became easily popular because it gave a nice notation, and a sprinkling of type, to assembly language memory manipulation concepts that most professional programmers already knew how to use.