The C language was developed in the early 1970s at AT&T labs by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. AT&T is a large telecommunications company based in the United States. The language was developed in order to write the UNIX operating system, and was indeed used for this purpose. Since that time, literally thousands of applications have been written in C (not to mention countless student assignments!).

C is a small language with relatively few commands. The commands that it has are all quite simple. This is good as it makes it easy to learn, but it also means that you must use a lot of commands to accomplish a task. In order to make programming in C easier, a number of libraries have been written. These libraries allow you to use higher level commands or functions which make it easier to write a program. Don't worry too much about libraries right now. It will all become clear soon enough!

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