Elizabeth Rather

Elizabeth Rather, known as Bess and born in 1940, is the co-founder of FORTH, Inc. and a leading expert in the Forth programming language. She became involved with Forth while at the University of Arizona, working part-time for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory; she first aimed to rewrite its Forth systems in FORTRAN, but her discovery of the power of Forth convinced her to leave the university and work for the observatory and for Kitt Peak National Observatory, where she wrote the first Forth manual and started popularizing the language in the scientific community. She co-founded FORTH, Inc. with Charles Moore in 1973 and was its president from 1980 to 2006, headquartered in the Los Angeles area. From 1986 to 1994 she chaired the Technical Committee X3J14 that developed the ANSI standard for the Forth programming language, she is the author of several books on the subject, and she retired in 2006 to Hawaii.