History of C
C was developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972, at American Telegraph & Telecommunication (AT & T) bell laboratories in New Jersey USA. It was written originally programming under UNIX operating system. C was developed from BCPL (BASIC COMBINED PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE) which was improved and renamed as B. B was developed in1960's at Cambridge University.
C is actually a symbolic instruction code, a set of commands that performs action a code. The C language is often referred as middle level language because we can write high as well as low level programs through C language. C permits very close interaction with the inner working of the computer.
What is C ?
C is a programming language used to write a program. Programs are a set of instructions given by a user or programmer to the computer in high level language. C uses a compiler to compile i.e. translate the high level programming language into machine code before executing any instructions. Compiler is itself a computer program. Other translators and and interpreters and assembler. The original high level program is called the source program and the resulting machine language program is called the object program.