What would early alternatives to C have been?

The 80's was a weird time, lots of computer graduates were coming into the workplace with pascal largely driven by Turbo Pascal, but the ease of the Turbo Pascal IDE just was not there on mini-computers VMS/UNIX, nor were there any widespread Pascal compilers for micro-controllers. Most soon fell in line with C.

It did however feel like touch and go though in 1985, and I had my feet in both camps, going into the Pascal Camp for personal development on the PC and C for all my UNIX and micro-controller development.

Seems like BCPL should get a mention too

The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS)