The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s by Dennis M. Ritchie, an employee from Bell Labs (AT&T). In the 1960s, Ritchie worked with several other employees of Bell Labs (AT&T) on a project called Multics. The goal of the project was to develop an operating system for the large computer that could be used by many users. Bell Labs withdrew from the project in 1969, as it could not produce an economically useful system. Hence the employees of Bell Labs (AT&T) had to search for another project to work on (mainly Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson). Ken Thompson began to work on the development of a new file system for the DEC PDP-7, in assembler. Soon they began to make improvements and add expansions. They used the knowledge from the Multics project to add improvements. After a while a complete system was born. Brian W. Kernighan called the system UNIX, a sarcastic reference to Multics. The whole system was still written in assembly code.