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C and its time
In the seventies C was created by Kernighan and Ritchie - the fathers of Unix. They derived C from a previous language "B" and used it to write the first versions of Unix on PDP11 machines. Those machines were slow compared to our standards today and system programming was usually done in assembler. C had the following revolutionary features:
A high-level language suitable for system programming
A portable language that could run on many different systems
A FAST language with little overhead
An easy to learn language with a small set of keywords and little restrictions
The C syntax is used in many newer languages like C++ and Java. But those languages are object orientied in nature and the similarities with C fooled many programmers into believing that it was only a small step from C to OO.