In what year was the C programming language created, and how do you peg it?

1972 → tub · gun.

Dennis Ritchie developed C at Bell Labs around 1972, evolving it from Ken Thompson's earlier "B" language. Its payoff came in 1973, when Unix was rewritten in C — the first time a major operating system was written in a portable high-level language instead of raw assembly, letting Unix (and later Linux) move between wildly different machines. C's lean design — close to the hardware yet readable — made it the mother tongue of systems programming; C++, Java, C#, Go and countless others still borrow its syntax. Peg 19 · 72 → tub · gun: a smoking gun dropped into a tub.