C didn't take over from Basic. Basic was used by the end user because it was free with the machine. It wasn't used by that many software engineers. Most of the

C didn't take over from Basic. Basic was used by the end user because it was free with the machine. It wasn't used by that many software engineers. Most of the software made for the early personal computer (8-bit era) was written in assembly. Assembly was still popular on the 16 bit machines, but most software was written in Pascal or C.