Beginning in the early 1980s, Moore shifted focus to designing stack machines in hardware conjoined with Forth-like languages to run on them.

He distanced himself from Forth proper, which by then had an official standard, and built ever more minimalist stack languages to support his own needs, particularly processor design.

He entered Stanford University for graduate school to study mathematics but in 1965 he left to move to New York City to become a freelance programmer.

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 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.