1940s – early 1960s:
System software was supplied by hardware manufacturers and was used by all users. A single application always used the entire machine.
Early programming languages: Fortran, LISP, COBOL
Grace Hopper wrote one of the first compilers to automatically turn human readable program into machine code.
1970s:
Ritchie and Thompson wanted to port UNIX v4 from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11 They looked for a portable programming language, and tried the B language but then invented C as an imperative language supporting structured programming.
1980s:
Bjarne Stroustrup aims to enrich C with new abstraction mechanisms creates C++
A major influence is the first object-oriented programming language Simula
2010s:
New systems programming languages appear. Rust (2010) and Swift (2014) are successful examples that include many functional programming language features