Forth (programming Language) - History

History

Forth evolved from Charles H. Moore's personal programming system, which had been in continuous development since 1958. Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory. After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade.

Forth is so named because in 1968 "the file holding the interpreter was labeled FOURTH, for 4th (next) generation software—but the IBM 1130 operating system restricted file names to 5 characters." Moore saw Forth as a successor to compile-link-go third-generation programming languages, or software for "fourth generation" hardware, not a fourth-generation programming language as the term has come to be used.

Because Charles Moore had frequently moved from job to job over his career, an early pressure on the developing language was ease of porting to different computer architectures. A Forth system has often been used to bring up new hardware. For example, Forth was the first resident software on the new Intel 8086 chip in 1978 and MacFORTH was the first resident development system for the first Apple Macintosh in 1984.

FORTH, Inc.'s microFORTH was developed for the Intel 8080, Motorola 6800, and Zilog Z80 microprocessors starting in 1976. MicroFORTH was later used by hobbyists to generate Forth systems for other architectures, such as the 6502 in 1978. Wide dissemination finally led to standardization of the language. Common practice was codified in the de facto standards FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 in the years 1979 and 1983, respectively. These standards were unified by ANSI in 1994, commonly referred to as ANS Forth.

Forth became very popular in the 1980s because it was well suited to the small microcomputers of that time, as it is compact and portable. At least one home computer, the British Jupiter ACE, had Forth in its ROM-resident operating system. The Canon Cat also used Forth for its system programming. Rockwell also produced single-chip microcomputers with resident Forth kernels, the R65F11 and R65F12. A complete family tree is at TU-Wien.