Member-only story
IT HISTORY
The Programming Language That Tried To Be Everything — And Accidentally Created C
How IBM’s universal ambition drove Bell Labs out of Multics — and forged the minimalist core of modern software.
One afternoon in the late 1960s, deep inside the computer room at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Doug McIlroy stared at a fresh billing sheet spitting from a line printer.
His expression was colder than the machine room air conditioning.
As head of the Computing Techniques Research Department, McIlroy was guiding Bell Labs through the most ambitious software undertaking in history: Multics.
Conceived by MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs, Multics promised to turn raw computing into a municipal public utility, streaming cycles into homes and offices like water from a tap.
Reality collapsed at the first gate.
On the room-sized GE-645 mainframe, compiling a basic operating system kernel module seized the CPU for an extended stretch and consumed a large share of…
