Thanks for the responses.
Yes I am looking for the older vanilla client and server. 1.7 is fine as long as I can use forge, I guess.
I have downloaded forge 1.7.10. When I ran it, it asked me to at least run Minecraft 1.7.10 once but I only have v1.8.
I must have missed something that is obvious to you all.
I am also not sure what is the launcher. The minecraft executable is all in one single file.