C was invented in 1972
In the beginning of the 1970s, Dennis Ritchie from Bell Laboratories worked on a project to improve the UNIX operating system.
An operating system is a set of programs that manage resources and communicate with the user.
Dennis needed a brief and apt language that could generate robust and fast programs.
For these needs, assembler was usually used. – But assembler has some disadvantages. Programs developed in assembler cannot be ported to another platform without a complete rewrite.
Because of this, Dennis invented the C programming language, based on some other languages (like B and BCPL).
A compiler is a program that translates C programs into machine code for the target platform.