Charles (Chuck) H. Moore

Inventor of the Forth programming language, Moore is recognized as one of the most influential figures in programming language history.

Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1938, Moore grew up in Flint, Michigan, where he was granted a National Merit scholarship to MIT, at which he joined Kappa Sigma fraternity. Awarded a degree in physics, he arrived at Stanford, where he studied mathematics for two years. He then worked on Fortran II for the IBM 704 to predict Moonwatch satellite observations at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Around this time he began learning Algol for the Burroughs B5500 to optimize, and as Charles H. Moore and Associates, he wrote a Fortran-Algol translator to support a timesharing service. In 1968, while employed at the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), he invented the initial version of the Forth programming language to help control radio telescopes. In 1971 he co-founded (with Elizabeth Rather) FORTH, Inc., the first, and still one of the leading, purveyors of Forth solutions.

During the 1970s, Moore ported Forth to dozens of computer architectures. In the 1980s, he turned his attention and Forth development techniques to CPU design, developing several stack machine microprocessors and gaining several microprocessor-related patents along the way. His designs all emphasized high performance at low power usage. He also explored alternate Forth architectures such as cmForth and machine Forth, which more closely matched his chips' machine languages. These later evolved in 1996 into colorForth for the IBM PC.

In 1983 he founded Novix, Inc., where he developed the NC4000 processor. This design was licensed to Harris Semiconductor, which marketed it as the RTX2000, a radiation-hardened stack processor that was used in numerous NASA missions. In 1985, at his consulting firm Computer Cowboys, Moore developed the Sh-Boom processor.

Starting in 1990, he developed his own VLSI CAD system, OKAD, to overcome limitations in existing CAD software. He used these tools to develop several multi-core minimal instruction set computer (MISC) chips: the MuP21 in 1990 and the F21 in 1993. He was also a founder of iTv Corp, one of the first companies to work on internet appliances, and in 1996 he designed another custom chip for that system, the i21.

One of his notable projects was the colorForth dialect of Forth, a language derived from the scripting language for his custom VLSI CAD system, OKAD. In 2001, Moore rewrote OKAD in colorForth and designed the c18 processor. In 2005, he co-founded and became Chief Technology Officer of IntellaSys, which developed and marketed his chip designs, such as the seaForth-24 multi-core processor. In 2009, he co-founded and became CTO of GreenArrays, Inc., which marketed the GA4 and GA144 multi-computer chips. He has authored "History of Programming Languages, Volume 2" (excerpt), 1996, ISBN 0-201-89502-1.