When he told about that in the Fireside chat, I was really puzzled at first. I think Chuck was just being the eccentric guy he is was telling a cautionary tale for the shock effect, in a kind of dark humorous way. Also the guy is 88 years old now, so it's somewhat understandable when your energy levels are extremely low, both physically and mentally. With the little time left of your life, you wouldn't want to spend it fixing some random breaking API change from Windows.

I imagine his ColorForth has been more like a retirement hobby for the past decade. He used to screenshare from his ColorForth during the calls, but that could have been overcome more easily with a VGA->HDMI capture dongle and running ColorForth natively. And I doubt he needed the TCP/IP stack directly on his ColorForth based on what he shared so far. So I don't see the point of porting over to Windows to begin with. After all, ColorForth runs more easily on bare metal, on UEFI/BIOS or whatever, so it didn't ever need BitBlt to draw things on screen for sure. The guy built a ColorForth processor, and the devkit from GreenArrays has a VGA connector, etc. So I believe Chuck was on to something else when he shared that, perhaps just to stimulate thinking, but people tend to take things at face value.

On another note, ColorForth (or FORTH for that matter) is not meant to be owned/controlled by him or a committee. So it's not like he was maintaining it. AFAIK, he didn't even endorse or support FORTH standardization efforts, and somewhere said it's silly. I also find it interesting that in his book A Problem Oriented Language, there is not a single mention of FORTH even once (except in the preface, and in his bio) yet he describes FORTH in the book, just calls it as "A Problem Oriented Language" without naming it. So it's almost like FORTH doesn't exist. It's just an idea. And what doesn't exist cannot be broken.