Charles H. Moore

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Charles H. Moore

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

In 1968, while employed at the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Moore invented the initial version of the Forth 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 he ported Forth to dozens of computer architectures.

In the 1980s, Moore turned his attention and Forth development techniques to CPU design, developing several stack machine microprocessors and gaining several microprocessor-related patents [1] along the way. His designs have 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 Moore 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 which has been used in 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, OKAD, to overcome limitations in existing CAD software. He used these tools to develop several multi-core minimal instruction set computer 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 chip for this system, the i21.

One of Chuck's recent projects is the colorForth dialect of Forth, a language derived from the scripting language for his custom 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 multi-core processor.