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It was called "C" because many features derived from an earlier language named "B", in commemoration of its parent, BCPL. BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.
C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. It is a staple of the Open Source community. Bjarne Stroustrup and others at Bell Labs worked in the late 1980s to add object-oriented programming language constructs to C, creating a language called C++ (thus avoiding the issue of whether the successor to "B" and "C" should be "D" or "P").
The programming language C has been standardised in the form of an ISO standard. It is standard number ISO 9899. The first ISO edition of this document was published in 1990 (ISO 9899:1990) and was itself a minor modification of a slightly earlier ANSI standard (number anyone?). Subsequent editions have been made, some of which have been largely ignored; As of 2001 the most recent edition is ISO 9899:1999 which was known when it was in draft stage as C9X?.