Charles H. Moore

Creator of the Forth programming language

• Born: 1938
• Place of Birth: McKeesport, Pennsylvania

Primary Company/Organization: FOURTH, Inc.

Introduction

Charles H. Moore is best known as the creator of Forth, a programming language for process control, instrumentation, and peripherals that is still in use by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The name originally was Fourth, but the IBM 1130 minicomputer for which Moore originally wrote the language allowed only five-character names. Moore also founded FORTH, Inc. and created colorForth when the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) codified megaForth (which Moore found to be cumbersome and unwieldy) as the standard version of Forth. Moore is an advocate of the KISS concept (keep it simple, stupid) and improved on the original Forth to make the simpler, faster, and more versatile colorForth. He is also a follower of John McCarthy, primarily involved in artificial intelligence, in contradistinction to the other school of computing, led by Doug Engelbart, which focused on how computers could enhance the human mind.

Early Life

Charles H. “Chuck” Moore was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1938, and was reared in Flint, Michigan. He was valedictorian of Central High School in 1956 and was awarded a National Merit Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity. In 1960, Moore earned a degree in physics with a thesis on data reduction for the Explorer 11 gamma-ray satellite, which was launched in June 1961. From 1961 to 1963, he studied mathematics at Stanford University.

Life's Work

Moore mastered several computer languages. He learned Lisp from McCarthy at Stanford and then moved to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1958 learning Fortran II for an IBM 704 to predict Moonwatch satellite orbits. The job at SAO was part time.

In 1962, Moore started learning ALGOL for the Burroughs B5500 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Founding Charles Moore and Associates in 1964, he wrote a Fortran-ALGOL translator for his time-sharing service.

In 1968, Moore moved to suburban Amsterdam, New York, where he took a job with a carpet and furniture manufacturer, Mohasco Industries. He also mastered COBOL for the IBM 1130 in use at Mohasco, with the goal of using computer graphics to design carpets. Moore had to deal with a new IBM 1130, whose programming in Fortran required multiple card decks, and Fortran could not use the disk and graphics display. Moore created Forth, which used both disk and graphics display, making it interactive and its programming easier and faster.

In 1971, George Conant offered Moore a position at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). At NRAO, Moore's job involved controlling several telescopes and data collection/reduction systems. While working at NRAO, Moore adapted Forth to the Honeywell 316 to control radio telescopes and data collection and reduction systems. Conant did not like Moore's using Forth to control the telescope when all the other work at NRAO was in Fortran. However, he agreed when Moore demonstrated that he could finish projects with better capabilities in weeks rather than years. At NRAO, Moore, met Elizabeth Rather, who was hired to provide support, which involving learning and documenting Forth. They worked to reprogram computers at NRAO and completed Forth. As Moore put it on his website, www.colorforth.com: “NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished.” In 1971, Moore and Rather founded FORTH, Inc.

Moore next decided to build a Forth chip to realize the architecture intrinsic to Forth. He was a founder of Novix, Inc., and implemented the NC4000 (1983) as a gate array. He developed and sold kits to promote the chip. A derivative was eventually sold to Harris Semiconductor, which marketed it as the RTX2000 for space applications (1988).

Founding Computer Cowboys, Moore designed the Sh-Boom microprocessor in 1985. In 1990, he developed his own design tools for the MuP21, with multiple specialized processors; in 1993, the F21, featuring a network interface; and in 1996, the i21 for his new enterprise iTv Corp., with a similar architecture with enhanced performance designed for Internet applications. In 2001, he designed the c18 microcomputer, a simple core that can be replicated many times on a single chip. Each of his chips has emphasized high performance and low power.

When the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) designated megaForth, which Moore considered unwieldy, as the standard version of Forth, Moore, refuting the decision, developed colorForth. Moore defines colorForth as a dialect of Forth, a simpler Forth, and a return with enhancements to the original idea. It is faster and more efficient in using compile time rather than run time, although it has been mostly ignored by the Forth community.

In the early 2000s, early patents for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors began expiring, among them the set covered by the Moore microprocessor patent awarded in 1989 and good through 2012. The patents were in dispute between IntellaSys and its parent company Technology Properties Limited (TPL), in Cupertino, California (where Moore served as chief technology officer), and Patriotic Scientific of Carlsbad, California.

Moore had hoped to achieve his long-standing goal of creating high-performance, low-dissipation Forth chips. He planned a “sea of processors platform” to maximize per-watt performance for embedded applications. The initial publicity in October 2005 was light on details and strong on hope, with a planned beta version by early 2006. The company was just ramping up, interviewing people for engineering and manufacturing jobs. Intellasys was the result of a settlement in 2006 of the long-standing intellectual property dispute with Patriotic Scientific CPU developers over several patents covering the Moore microprocessor package. After the two firms agreed to cooperate, TPL began selling the technology through Alliacense, and buyers included Intel, AMD, Casio, Hewlett Packard, and Sony. The Sony license was a big step, Sony being a major player. Alliacense also had negotiations under way with dozens of other companies. However, others were unimpressed with the tools. More important, TPL was moving beyond licensing to production, including the Intellasys component; Moore was working on a $10 chip running Forth natively without a clock. Intellasys intended to use a 24-core Forth microcontroller initially with a 40-core seaForth 40C18 in 2008. Early in 2009, Intellasys folded, and Moore formed GreenArray, hired the core Intellasys team, and began producing a chip with 144 Forth cores. In 2010, Moore sued TPL and Alliacense for fraud and breach of contract.

Moore's software remained in use into the 2020s. Derivatives of Forth were still used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which considered it the language of choice for instrumentation, peripherals, and process control, and the European Space Agency (ESA). Ahead of his time, Moore waited for the programming world to catch up with his belief that simplicity promotes effective software development. Forth was the forebear of PostScript and STOIC.

Personal Life

Moore married Winifred Bellis in 1967. Their son Eric was born in 1969. With her he traveled around the world, moved often in his career, and spent time hiking and exploring from the Appalachian to the San Gabriel Mountains. When finances forced Moore and the family to move to Sierra City, California, from San Francisco, they continued hiking, she led a library knitting group, he became a fire commissioner. In 2005, she died suddenly of heart failure in Phoenix on one of his business trips, just before he became prosperous. As Moore put it, “I lost half of my memory and life will never be the same without her.”

Developing a new language is a daunting prospect because it requires vast expenditure of creative man-years. Moore originally intended to keep Forth simple, to get it done quickly. He continued using Forth for quick programs into the twenty-first century and as mental stimulation; as he put it, writing Forth programs was more fun and better for his brain than crossword puzzles or Sudoku.

Bibliography

Biancuzzi, Federico, and Shane Warden. Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2009. Print. Includes a chapter on Forth and Moore.

Brodie, Leo. Thinking Forth: A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984. Print. Deals with Forth as a case study in the philosophy and practice of programming rather than a technical discussion of Forth, using interviews with Moore and other Forth users.

Catsoulis, John. Designing Embedded Hardware. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2005. Print. The focus is on hardware, but the book includes an explanation of what Forth is and how it works, arguing that hardware design has to accommodate the software that the hardware runs.

“Charles Moore: Carpet Patterns, Telescopes and Forth.” InfoWorld 4.40 (1982): 17+. Print. Profile of Moore and Forth, but good for the early years. This issue of InfoWorld focused on Forth.

Clarke, Peter. “Microprocessor Pioneer Sues Patent Pool Firms.” Electronic Engineering Times 11 Oct. 2010: 20. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 May 2012. Moore had difficulties with TPL, leading to litigation in 2010.

Flaherty, Nick. “Untitled.” Electronics Weekly 2250 (2006): 21. Business Source Complete. Web. 8 May 2012. Fairly detailed article about patents and potential infringement as early RISC patents expire but others remain in force; includes coverage of Moore's patents.

Moore, Charles H. “The A–Z of Programming Languages: Forth.” Interview by Naomi Hamilton. 27 June 2008. Computerworld. Web. 16 Aug. 2012. Moore discusses why he invented Forth and why he still uses it.

---. “Chuck Moore: Geek of the Week.” Interview bny Richard Moore. 5 August 2009. Web. Simple-Talk. 12 May 2012. Moore looks back on his career and discusses Forth.

Rather, Elizabeth, Donald R. Coburn, and Charles H. Moore. The Evolution of Forth. Mar. 1993. Forth.com. Web. 16 Aug. 2012. A detailed history of Forth from its original creation by Moore through its development beyond Moore.

“Startup Intelasys Targets Multicore Processors.” Electronic News 51.44 (2005): n. pag. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 May 2012. Describes Intelasys, with background on Moore and his partner Chester Brown.

Williams, Greg. “Threads of a Forth Tapestry.” Byte 5.8 (1980): n. pag. Web. 15 May 2012. This editorial by Williams focuses on the inner workings of the Moore Forth operation; the editorial appears in a special issue of Byte on the Forth language.