Comic Chat has a special place in my heart because it inspired my first startup back in 2008, a comic creation web app called Chogger. The site grew to 30K monthly users, mostly K-12 educators who wanted to give their students a fun way to write stories.
The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon tail dragging behavior just right...
one of the teachers made a video overview of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw
Comic Chat is a piece of Internet history, but I remember that it was somewhat reviled when I first started being active on IRC. This was around 2002, so it was probably due to some cultural memory rather than anyone having actually used it in years.
The issue, as I remember it, is that Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character, rather than relying entirely on contextual cues. This was essentially done by adding some nonsense string to every message, which presumably could be decoded by other Comic Chat users, but read like spammy noise to everyone else. I know it did that, because I remember downloading Comic Chat to check it out, but I forget whether it was the default or not.
Like,
># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)
I remember implementing the paper at some point, and though it was fun enough that it would make for a slightly less boring programming project for students.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
Rands is a programmer/PM IRL: https://randsinrepose.com/
Ahhh jerkcity. A classic.
HAGHLUABLABG
I can't believe this is still going
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My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
Direct link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
Someone wants to taste the curb!
Were it not for Microsoft Comic Chat, who knows how long it would have taken for Dominoes to make ordering pizza online happen?
That’s hilarious. I hope to see some fun spinoffs.
Ran comic chat on a freshly installed Win98 (or 95, don’t remember) Pentium II.
Only tangentially related, but I'm convinced Comic Sans is the best font option available in Slack, and everyone should try it.
Comic Mono is the best code font and I will fight anyone who disagrees
I don't know if this is should be called heresy or genius, but I've just updated my Slack for the next 7 days. Let's see how long I last
Jerk City sends its regards
Extend, embrace
Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!
This was my first introduction to internet
v1.0-pre and v1.0 share the same internal version number (rup 206, "Beta 2") but differ in ~99 of 111 shared source files [1]
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%2...
[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...
Microsoft had just acquired SourceSafe in 1995, but it's not clear to me how similar to modern version control systems SourceSafe even was in 1995/6. It may have been more of a distributed lock manager than change management system.
When I used visual source safe it was primarily more like a lock manager. I don't recollect what it did in terms of file versioning, but I definitely remember having to bug someone to let go of a file I needed
SLM was at version 1.5 by 1988 and looking at chapter 5 suggests it had strong version number and external release management [1]
[1]: https://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SLM-1.5-Guides.p...
I think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.
This is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)
The creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.
As "Principal Program Manager, Copilot Acceleration Team" even. That's sad.
It sounds like person in charge of "Hey do you want Copilot? How about now? How about now? And now?! Here's another popup! Do you want it now? Why not?! Have you tried Copilot?" Etc...
(I know about title inflation, he's probably not in charge of all that much, but still)
It's a team (part of engineering, not sales) that helps companies that bought M365 Copilot and/or Copilot Studio use it well - http://aka.ms/whoiscat
That's the article author Robert Standefer, I don't think he created Comic Chat, that was David Kurlander...
here's the creator on his creation: https://kurlander.net/DJ/Projects/ComicChat/resources
Thank you. This should be a top-level comment.
Copilot means so many things now it doesn't even tell you anything about they do.
It was explained to me that the word "Copilot" is just Microsoft's brand for what the rest of us call "AI" - just like "365" means "online", "Azure" means "cloud", "Entra" means "login" and ".NET" used to mean "with a computer".
So when you see something like "Azure Copilot 365" you can pretend they wrote, fully generically, "Online Cloud AI".
If you see a button labelled "Copilot" you understand it would've said "AI" if they were any other company.
Microsoft Comic Chat was my first introduction to IRC. I was just a kid poking around in system32 directory and found mschat.exe. It opened a whole new world. I still participate in IRC communities to this day. I regularly reference it.
So it's a shame that microsoft is blocking non-corporate browsers from accessing this news release, "The request is blocked. 20260716T162640Z-r17d8486fc4rbjkdhC1CHI16pc00000008m000000000a54t" I imagine most people who care about MS Comic Chat aren't using Chrome or Edge. A better URL since MS is blocking might be https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS or just the github repo that's in another comment.
I still think this project has potential.
>Alongside the original snapshots, we’ve included a few AI-powered modernization attempts that demonstrate what’s possible—getting this 1990s-era C++ and MFC code building with current Visual Studio tools, connecting to modern IRC servers, and running legibly on today’s high-resolution Windows machines.
Given that MSFT is all in on Rust and WinUI now, maybe they can try doing a full port similar to Bun using Copilot. Anthropic has been milking their Bun port attempt for as much as they can.
\me plays ahhhBeer.wav
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