This is a nice description of C detail, but C has a much broader history in computing. I worked at Rutgers (New Brunswick) and my wife to be at Bell Labs (Piscataway) in the mid to late 1970s. There is more to C. C was the first language which was both the major application language and the language used to code Unix and code itself. Even in the 2000s it's simple form was still the default language for machine controllers like disk drives (where I became a Chief Technologist for Seagate for example). Her job was to support Unix to all of AT&T by writing shell scripts (including C routines for scripts) to mimic any other AT&T system (e.g., Borroughs, IBM, etc. mainframe) operating systems using "Programmers Workbench Unix" -- Guess what language. Inside AT&T you logged into a PDP 11 and didn't know where you were logging in (a PDP 11 somewhere, perhaps Colorado, for example) and worked, unknowingly, off that machine. Fully networked (pre-Internet). She was one of three young women at Bell Labs supporting this infrastructure throughout AT&T, and we would work together at night developing shell applications on my Rutgers-provided HP terminal just off the Rutgers Busch Campus where she was a Ph.D. student as well. Another thing not mentioned about C is that K&R was/is a very small book. That was huge. We used C at CMU in the 1980s and early 1990s to develop the CMU Ray Tracer (Open Source) which later became, in its 3D Voxel versions, the unreported basis for many commercial CT Scanner, etc., and other graphics programs. I still have that code as originally written.
The primary author of that code worked for me, Tim Chow (a Princeton Mathematics Undergrad who worked Summers for me at CMU), who took K&R and went from never having coded to producing the commercial of that code in three months working 8 hour days in my lab under my contract with GM. That also became the code for all the headlamps and taillamps that have clear bezels and scalloped reflectors on all cars in the world (Tim and my invention which GM, sadly, refused, inexplicably, to Patent). That said, Python which combined ideas from C and Lisp is my fav from all time thanks to millions of dollars from DARPA to follow on expressly combining the conceptual advancements of C and LISP in one programming language. C++ was considered a bad joke (huge books, buggy junk). Objective C was nice but doomed by the squeeze of the Python which incorporated its objective programming features as well. I am sure many of the other commenters here have really interesting stories as well to give a more comprehensive view of C and why and how it succeeded (and is still used today in machines with CPUs of different sorts). Simplicity is really nice if you have work to do.
