[timbit42]

C came out in 1972, but we had Pascal in 1970 which is strongly typed and doesn't have undefined behavior. Pascal wasn't perfect and did have a few issues with use in writing operating systems but Modula-2 and it's descendants were really good. The early versions of the Macintosh System were written in Pascal and used assembly to handle the low level bits Pascal was missing. With Rust we're finally getting back to safe programming. I'm hoping to see other existing and new languages with more safety.

[ncmncm]

Apollo Aegis, a system that was inspired, like Unix, by Multics, and was better than Unices of the time, was coded in Apollo Pascal. You could identify the difference between Standard Pascal and an actually useful Pascal by looking at Apollo Pascal extensions.

Pascal had null pointers and manual allocation, so was not really any safer than, anyway, C90. Of course C pre-90 lacked even function prototype declarations.