Garbage collection isn't the only way of writing mostly safe systems programs.
ESPOL, NEWP are 10 year older than C.
PL/8 was the systems programming language used by IBM for their first RISC mainframe, followed by PL/S.
Mesa used at Xerox PARC.
Modula-2 used at ETHZ and many 16 bit systems.
Object Pascal used to write the first versions of Mac OS and Lisa.
Ada and SPARK used by high integrity systems where human lives can be at risk.
All of them with not even a quarter of C's UB collection.