This is a grossly inaccurate description of computing at the time of the rise of C. C was competing with Pascal/Modula, BLISS, PL/I, BCPL, and so on, not assembly on punched cards.
The “C competing with assembly” meme was very specific to microcomputer game and operating system development, not more general microcomputer application development, and not to minicomputer or mainframe development.
A lot of it was written in Turbo Pascal, which (among many other things that would have caused Niklaus Wirth to break out in hives) let you include inline machine code (and later, inline assembly language).
