Lisp variants have used the ' prefix as shorthand for the quote operator (interpret whatever comes next as a literal, instead of evaluating it) since about the time C became popular...
I don't know exactly when 'X denoting (QUOTE X) appeared, but I can see that it is described in a paper about the Lisp 2 system, from 1966. So it is at least 9 years before the B and NB languages evolved into C. The Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual from around 1962 doesn't mention it yet, using (QUOTE ...) for all occurrences of quote.
