This is Part I of a survey of recent developments in goal programming and multiple objective optimizations. In this part, attention is directed to goal programming with emphasis on the authors' own work (with others) in a variety of applications. This includes goal and goal interval programming, as well as characterizations which make it possible to obtain alternate representations and explicit solutions from special structural properties. Possibilities for various goal functional are explored and delineated. One class of examples is developed in detail and an algorithm is supplied which utilizes sequences of ordinary linear programming problems to solve certain nonlinear and non-convex problems involving maxims of ratios of linear forms.