Charles Moore: From FORTH to Stack Processors and Beyond
NRAO Radio Telescope
There are many greats of the CPU industry, some, such as Federico Faggin (designer of the 4004 and worked on the 8008, then founded Zilog) are fairly well known. Others include Gelsinger and Meyer (of x86 fame) perhaps even Gordon Moore, of which a ‘law’ is named. Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch designed the ubiquitous 6502 processor, but there were more, many more. Engineers whose names have been oft forgotten, but whose work has not. The 1970’s and 80’s were the fast and the furious of processor designs. Some designs were developed, sold, or canceled in weeks, months; years were not a period of time that was available to these designers, for in a year, a new technology would dictate a new design.
One of these designers is Charles H. Moore. (aka Chuck Moore). Chuck is perhaps best known for inventing the FORTH programming language in 1968, originally to control telescopes. It was a stack based language, and lended itself well to small microcomputers and microcontrollers. Some microcontrollers even embedded a FORTH kernel in ROM. It was also designed to be able to be ported to different architectures easily. FORTH continues to be used today for a variety of applications. However Chuck did not just invent a 1970’s programming language.
