>In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative
Actually, what made sense _was_ assembly when performance mattered above all. C was actually seen as a higher level language.
However C's advantage was the fact that it was cross platform, so you could compile or quite easily port the same
code to many different platforms with a C compiler (Solaris,Windows,BSD,Linux and latterly Mac OSX). That was its strength (pascal shared this too, but it didn't survive).
You can see this in the legacy of software that's still in use today - lots of gnu utilities, shells, X windows, the zlib library, the gcc, openssl and discussed fairly recently POV Ray which has been going since the 80's.
Actually, what made sense _was_ assembly when performance mattered above all. C was actually seen as a higher level language.
However C's advantage was the fact that it was cross platform, so you could compile or quite easily port the same code to many different platforms with a C compiler (Solaris,Windows,BSD,Linux and latterly Mac OSX). That was its strength (pascal shared this too, but it didn't survive).
You can see this in the legacy of software that's still in use today - lots of gnu utilities, shells, X windows, the zlib library, the gcc, openssl and discussed fairly recently POV Ray which has been going since the 80's.