At one extreme you have all the 'real' languages. At the time, real computer scientists would have used Algol68. Structured and clever, Algol was a great language but you couldn't do anything very low level with it. At the other extreme there is assembler which people had to resort to if they wanted to do anything close to the hardware. Assembler is only one step removed from machine code which makes writing reliable, bug-free code very difficult, especially when you're building something as large and complex as an operating system.
C fits in the middle.
Hello world . Most 'serious' languages have some concept of a them. Some call them references, some call them links, but they all, basically, refer to something that identifies a chunk of memory. No pointers, no language. That's really a pointer.