Chuck Moore on the Lost Art of Keeping It Simple

In the early days of computing, software written for one make of machine would not run on any other. Computer scientists wanted to define "programming languages" that could be universally understood. That this is the norm today - the software of the internet, for example, can run on every kind of computer. Chuck Moore was the first to turn this vision into reality: a simple language written in itself, with its own simple disk operating system,  requiring just a tiny kernel to be written in the native machine code to link with the hardware. As a result, FORTH could be used everywhere, and was. It was the start of a life-long quest to provide computing power as simply and cheaply as possible, as widely as possible. It has led to poineering work with what we now refer to as 'network computers', MISC CPU design and  the development of computer languages.

via Chuck Moore on the Lost Art of Keeping It Simple