Charles H. Moore

Charles H. Moore, also known as Chuck Moore (September 9, 1938), is the inventor of the Forth programming language.

In 1968, while employed by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the United States, Moore invented the initial version of the Forth language to help control radio telescopes. In 1971, he along with Elizabeth Rather co-founded Forth, Inc., the first, and still one of the leading providers of Forth solutions. During the 1970s he ported Forth to dozens of computer architectures.

In the 1980s, Moore turned his attention and Forth development technologies toward CPU design, developing, over the course of his work, several stack machine microprocessors and winning several microprocessor-related patents[1]. All of his designs emphasize high performance and low power consumption. He also explored alternate Forth architectures such as cmForth and machine Forth, which more closely matched the machine languages of his chips. These evolved, later in 1996, as the colorForth for the IBM PC.

In 1983, Moore founded Novix, Inc., where he developed the NC4000 processor. This design was licensed to Harris Semiconductor who marketed it as the RTX2000, a radiation-hardened processor stack that has been used on numerous NASA missions. In 1985, at his consulting firm Computer Cowboys, he developed the Sh-Boom processor. Starting in 1990, he developed his own VLSI CAD system, called OKAD, to overcome limitations in existing CAD software. He used these tools to develop several minimal instruction set (MISC) multicore chips: the MuP21 in 1990 and the F21 in 1993.

Moore was a founder of iTv Corp., one of the first companies to work on Internet appliances. In 1996 he designed another custom one for this system, the i21.

One of the most recent projects is the colorForth dialect of Forth, a language derived from scripting languages for their VLSI CAD system, OKAD. In 2001, he rewrote OKAD in colorForth and designed the c18 processor.

In 2005, Moore co-founded and became Chief Technology Officer of IntellaSys, which develops and markets his chip designs, such as the seaForth-24 multicore processor.

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• "History of Programming Languages, Volume 2" (excerpt) 1996, ISBN 0-201-89502-1