C took off because a few startups in the 80s used UNIX as the foundation of the workstations they were bringing into the market, like Sun for example.
As those workstations became a success in the US market, its use spread outside US and the need to have developers that could write software for them increased. This meant knowing C.
All the other operating systems at the time didn't offer C compilers. The few that did, it was just another language to choose from, most of the time only a subset of K&R C.
This is how the distinction between libc and POSIX APIs came to be. The original libc is mostly what could be implemented in other OSs without depending directly from the UNIX API semantics.
If the likes of Sun and SGI hadn't succeeded, most probably C would be a footnote just like Algol.
I have been writing software since 1986 and 1992 was the first time I cared to learn C, just to quickly ditch it for C++ on the year thereafter.
As those workstations became a success in the US market, its use spread outside US and the need to have developers that could write software for them increased. This meant knowing C.
All the other operating systems at the time didn't offer C compilers. The few that did, it was just another language to choose from, most of the time only a subset of K&R C.
This is how the distinction between libc and POSIX APIs came to be. The original libc is mostly what could be implemented in other OSs without depending directly from the UNIX API semantics.
If the likes of Sun and SGI hadn't succeeded, most probably C would be a footnote just like Algol.
I have been writing software since 1986 and 1992 was the first time I cared to learn C, just to quickly ditch it for C++ on the year thereafter.