In the 1970s, Dennis Ritchie invented a new computer language called C that, as with UNIX in the operating system world, was designed to be nonconstraining and flexible. Though operating systems had typically been written in tight assembler language to extract the highest efficiency from their host machines, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie realized that both hardware and compiler technology had advanced enough that a whole C operating system could be written. By 1978, the entire environment was ported to computers of varying types.

See Also: Programming Languages C, C++, Perl, and Java; Thompson, Ken; UNIX.