Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.

I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.