The authors give a historical review of the evolution of the Forth language from its beginnings as a simple interpreter (“Chuck Moore’s programming language”) in the early 1960s to the FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 standards of today. The paper provides a glowing account of Forth’s evolution, successes, and contributions, but touches only briefly on some of the concerns raised by its detractors, such as the lack of an explicit typing mechanism, operator overloading, and other classical program language design and software engineering issues. Although weakened by its one-sided approach to Forth, the paper does provide an easily read history of the evolution of a unique language and describes the directions in which it is expected to evolve.