An important part of C history is that in the early 1980s the IBM PC and clones became the most popular computer in the world and it was not really compatible w

An important part of C history is that in the early 1980s the IBM PC and clones became the most popular computer in the world and it was not really compatible with C. You could say your program was "tiny" and limit it to 64KB or fill your code with "near" and "far" pointers (if using Microsoft tools) or use @ instead of * (if using QNX tools), but the cost was not being able to port to/from the VAX/68000 world. All this went away with the 386, but without this problem it is likely that C would have overtaken Pascal even sooner. It is not hard to say what is unique about C: it and Forth are the only high level languages with seamless access to memory. If other languages offer it at all, like PEEK and POKE and Basic, it is far more awkward and interrupts your flow. That might be a good thing - the ESPOL compiler mentioned in the talk would print a big fat warning "YOU MUST KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!" after any line in your code doing C-like tricks.