Charles Havice Moore II

Forth

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. 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 which marketed an enhanced version 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 (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 appliances. In 1996 he designed another custom chip for this system, the i21.

Moore developed 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.

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

Publications

See also

  • List of pioneers in computer science

References

  • Chuck Moore's homepage archived, last updated 2013
  • GreenArrays his current venture
  • FORTH, Inc.
  • Interview at Simple-Talk (2009)
  • Chuck Moore patent on processor timing
  • Computerworld Interview
  • Forth Interest Group (FIG)