C was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. It was created to deal with limitations of earlier languages like B and BCPL. C is a general purpose, procedural programming language that is highly portable and can be compiled on various computer platforms. It is well-suited for system programming like operating systems and embedded systems. C provides features for structured programming, memory management, pointers, and interfacing with hardware. It remains widely used in software development today.