C was a lineal descendant of B, a language in which every variable had the same type: machine word. It was meant to be a step up (one step) from a macro assembler.

The existence of B always makes me laugh when someone claims Python is typeless. No, Python knows the difference between a string and a float, it just knows it at runtime. B, where everything is a machine word, and integers, floats, and pointers are all the same thing at the language level, is typeless.