C is a general-purpose programming language developed in the 1970s. It was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs to be used for the Unix operating system. Some key features of C include it being a mid-level language, supporting structured programming, having a rich standard library, and allowing for pointers and recursion. A simple "Hello World" program in C prints a message using printf and waits for input with getch. C supports various data types, operators, control structures like if/else and loops, functions, arrays, and pointers.