There are many legends as to the origin of C and its related operating system, [[Unix]], including:
* The development of C was the result of the programmer's desire to play andan ''[[Asteroids]]''-like game. They had been playing it on their company's [[mainframe]], but being underpowered and having to support about 100 users, Thompson and Ritchie found they didn't have sufficient control over the spaceship to avoid collisions with the wandering [[asteroid|space rocks]]. Thus, they decided to port the game to an idle [[PDP-7]] in the office. But it didn't have an [[operating system]] (OS), so they set about writing one. Eventually they decided to port the operating system to the office's [[PDP-11]], but this was onerous since all the code was in [[assembly language]]. They decided to use a higher-level portable language so the OS could be ported easily from one computer to another. They looked at using B, but it lacked functionality to take advantage of some of the PDP-11's advanced features. So they set about creating the new language, C.
*The justification for obtaining the original computer that was used to develop Unix was to create a system to automate the filing of patents. The original version of Unix was developed in assembly language. Later, the C language was developed in order to rewrite the operating system.
