Charles Havice Moore II (born 9 September 1938), better known as Chuck Moore, is an American

computer engineer Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and computer software, software. C ...

and programmer, best known for inventing the Forth programming language in 1968. He cofounded FORTH, Inc., with Elizabeth Rather in 1971 and continued to evolve the language. Beginning in the early 1980s, Moore built a series of processors implementing Forth-like

stack machine In computer science, computer engineering and programming language implementations, a stack machine is a computer processor or a virtual machine in which the primary interaction is moving short-lived temporary values to and from a push down ...

s in hardware, including the Novix NC4000 and Sh-Boom. In the 2000s he designed a series of low-power chips containing up to 144 individual stack processors.

Early career

Moore began programming at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory by the late 1950s. He attended the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

and received a bachelors in physics in 1961. He entered

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

for graduate school to study mathematics but in 1965 he left to move to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

to become a freelance programmer.

Forth

In 1968, while employed at the United States

National Radio Astronomy Observatory The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a federally funded research and development center of the United States National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. for the purpose of radio a ...

(NRAO), Moore invented the initial version of the Forth language to help control

radio telescope A radio telescope is a specialized antenna and radio receiver used to detect radio waves from astronomical radio sources in the sky. Radio telescopes are the main observing instrument used in radio astronomy, which studies the radio frequency ...

s. 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 In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

Forth to dozens of computer architectures.

Hardware design

In the 1980s, Moore turned his attention and Forth development techniques to

CPU design Processor design is a subfield of computer engineering and electronics engineering (fabrication) that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware. The design process involves choosing an instruction set and a certain exe ...

, developing several

microprocessors and gaining several

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

-related patents 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. In 1983 Moore founded Novix, Inc., where he developed the NC4000 processor. This design was licensed to

Harris Semiconductor Harris Corporation was an American technology company, defense contractor, and information technology services provider that produced wireless equipment, tactical radios, electronic systems, night vision equipment and both terrestrial and space ...

which marketed an enhanced version as the RTX2000, a

radiation hardened Radiation hardening is the process of making electronic components and circuits resistant to damage or malfunction caused by high levels of ionizing radiation (particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation), especially for environ ...

stack processor which has been used in numerous

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

missions. In 1985 at his consulting firm Computer Cowboys, he developed the Sh-Boom processor. Starting in 1990, he developed his own VLSI

CAD Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

system, OKAD, to overcome limitations in existing CAD software. He used these tools to develop several

multi-core A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such ...

minimal instruction set computer Minimal instruction set computer (MISC) is a central processing unit (CPU) architecture, usually in the form of a microprocessor, with a very small number of basic operations and corresponding opcodes, together forming an instruction set. Such ...

(MISC) 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 appliance An Internet appliance is a consumer device whose main function is easy access to Internet services such as WWW or e-mail. The term was popularized in the 1990s, when it somewhat overlapped in meaning with an information appliance, Internet com ...

s. In 1996 he designed another custom chip for this system, the i21.Mailing List: fire-side-chat
From:Jeff Fox, Sun, 17 November 1996 02:22:00 -0800, "...This box will contain iTV's i21 chip designed by Chuck Moore." Moore developed the

colorForth colorForth is a programming language from the Forth language's creator, Charles H. Moore, developed in the 1990s. The language combines elements of Moore's earlier Forth systems and adds color as a way of indicating how words should be interpret ...

dialect of Forth, a language derived from the scripting language for his custom VLSI

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 A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such ...

. In 2009, he co-founded and became CTO of GreenArrays, Inc which is marketing the GA4 and GA144 multi-computer chips.

Publications

References

External links