Most of the criticisms you hear about C today (type safety, memory safety, no garbage collection) were criticisms that C got when it was first invented.
In fact there are fewer criticisms of C than there used to be: a lot of the early criticism centered around syntax, but the C syntax kind of won, so you don't hear that anymore.
"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
This was in 1981, and "language designers and users have not learned this lesson." was a jab at C.
Also Xerox and ETHZ were busy using safer systems programming languages.
ESPOL and NEWP, already using UNSAFE blocks were the state of the art systems programing in the 60's.