Lost 1983 Programming Language Resurrected by Retro Compute YouTube Channel
A YouTube channel has resurrected a programming language that hadn’t been seen since the 1980s — in a testament to both the enduring power of our technology, and of the communities that care about it.
“I’ve been overwhelmed by how many people voiced their appreciation that we’d unearthed something previously apparently lost…” channel host Christian Simpson said in an email interview with The New Stack. And “More to the point, the software is actually good…!”
“Better than the version I beta tested in 1987…”
A Long-Standing Mystery
MicroText was a programming language for the Commodore 64 “that was being developed by one of my parents’ tenants, who lived upstairs…” Christian said in a video. “He was developing it, along with the National Physical Laboratory” (the U.K.’s national measurement standards lab).
Perfect fodder for “Retro Recipes,” which promises “nostalgic” videos about technology from the 1980s and 1990s. A campy trailer for the channel is styled after the 1980s TV show Knight Rider, calling it “a pixelated flight into the nostalgic world of a man whose tech no longer exists.”
Since in 2024, Simpson couldn’t find any information about it online, in a January video, he’d dubbed it “the programming language that doesn’t exist.” (Though Simpson had discovered a review he’d written about its beta version back in 1987 — when he was 14 years old. )
Even in 2024, Simpson remembered that MicroText “looked really cool. It replaced all those complex commands that you would use for programming with really simple ones, and let you produce really cool-looking stuff.” In his 1987 review, he’d applauded its ease of use and versatility, calling the language both “pleasing to look at and to use.”
Simpson always wondered what happened to the language, but “I never heard of it again.”
And in addition, Google searches produced no results. It felt like a lost moment of history since “I was actually, in a way, a tiny part of the development of commercial programming software for that very platform…”
“I even posted about it on several Commodore forums,” Simpson said — but seven years later… no replies.
Resurrection
Yet mid-September found Simpson sharing a second video with the rest of the story. The new plot twist? “In scouring eBay one day I found MicroText for the Commodore 64. Just sitting there, all innocently, like it hadn’t caused a big fuss…”
The floppy disk was in surprisingly good condition. Even its documentation had an authentic 1980s smell, “like you just walked into a computer shop that’s been locked for 35 years…” Simpson believed he’d found “the only known copy in existence…”
“The question now becomes: will it work?”
The moment of truth arrived. The floppy disk reader whirs… And a list of files appears! There are names like introdemo, sounddemo, and wel.com.
And there are also many files with a MicroText-specific filename extension: .sta
“What are all these things?” Simpson says in the video. “This is too exciting…” And soon he’s launching a demo program from 1985. He lingers for a moment as the title screen urges, “PRESS ANY KEY” with a flashing cursor…
“This is it. We’re about to enter MicroText.”
And when an all-grey screen comes up — with a white bar at the bottom for entering commands, Simpson shouts out excitedly, “Yes! This is what I remember!”
Wel.com
In MicroText each part of the program is like a webpage, Simpson explains: it can call other pages. (Though these pages are called “frames.”) The first program he tries — Wel.com — even lets you cursor through its frames, showing how they contain one-line instructions affecting the screen, its border, and which commands users are allowed to execute.
There are demo programs on commands, “basic concepts,” drawing a bar chart — and also “Escape from a hotel fire.”
And one screen makes this promise about the MicroText demo programs. “All of them are fun.”
“Escape from a Hotel Fire” turns out to be a text adventure. (Simpson notes MicroText’s frame-based structure is perfect for the room-to-room structure of most text adventures.) Simpson intentionally makes the worst choices and soon reaches a screen scolding, “You are dead because you took the wrong course of action in a fast-moving emergency.
“Would you like to be reincarnated and try again?”
There’s another demo program called Plug faultfinding. (Filename: PLU. Copyright 1983…) It’s exactly what it sounds like — a program teaching you to spot faults in electric plugs. You can tell the programs came from a government standards lab…
But Simpson is delighted with its multi-colored graphics.
And he’s even able to identify the plug’s problem by typing in “wrong fuse”.
“Well done,” the program responds. “The fuse was underrated and, as a result, had blown…
“Would you like to try another plug?”
The Language Itself
Simpson tests the “commands” demo. There’s RUN, TEST, COMMENT, COPY — all the basic instructions you’d expect in an early-days programming language.
A text string ending with a question mark will wait for user input. A frame number preceded by an equals sign shows which frame to access next…
“Holy moly, that’s so simple!” Simpson tells his audience.
Soon, Simpson is running through “Drawing a bar chart” and the “Sound & Vision” sampler. (“Holy moly! A 3D flying eraser!”) Simpson marvels at the graphics, then sighs reflectively.
“To think this whole thing was lost.”
There’s a primitive drawing of a Pac-Man-like creature chasing a stick figure — but then also program showing how to make your own animation-ready “sprites” using asterisks and commas — just like Simpson’s 1987 review had said…
And soon, Simpson is creating a sprite of a dog and then making it move diagonally across the screen.
A 2024 User Community
Within two weeks Simpson’s video had earned more than 100,000 views. And in an inspiring coda, Simpson says he even made contact with Diane Murray, who’d worked on the 1983 version of MicroText for the BBC Micro home computer back when she was a Civil Service Science Officer.
“It’s fascinating that there is such an interest in it after all these years,” Murray told him (in an email shared with The New Stack).
But best of all, Simpson uploaded the language to the Internet Archive, along with all his support materials, inviting his viewers to write their own programs (and saying he hoped his upstairs neighbor would’ve approved). And in our email interview, Simpson said since then it’s already been downloaded over 1,000 times — “which is pretty amazing for something so old.”
But in addition, “The community is writing programs, it seems.” (Toward the end of the video, Simpson shows a new Mars Lander program written in MicroText by one of his viewers.) “Expect more to come from this wonderful community.
“It’s a pleasure to be a part of a group of people who truly appreciate how the past gave us what we have today… and who also value the happiness of childhood nostalgia, and the value of looking back today.”
