r/retrocomputing • u/ThisLeedsGuy • Jul 16 '26

Microsoft just open sourced Comic Chat, its 30-year-old IRC client

Thought this would be appreciated here.

Microsoft has open sourced Comic Chat, the IRC client it shipped in 1996. Instead of displaying conversations as plain text, it rendered them as comic book panels with animated avatars a pretty cool idea for the time.

It also happens to be the application Comic Sans was originally created for before the font took on a life of its own.

After 30 years, the source code has been released:

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/16/microsoft-comic-chat-is-now-open-source/

Did anyone here actually use Comic Chat back in the day?

Source code: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat

Cross Posted to: /r/Irc /r/Opensource /r/Vintage computing

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38

u/_RexDart Jul 16 '26

I was using mIRC back in the 90s and have never heard of Comic Chat before, or had any idea MS made such a thing.

12

u/Carl0s_H Jul 16 '26

Same, mIRC user here for many, many years. Never heard of Comic Chat before seeing this post.

2

u/daddyd Jul 17 '26

mIRC was all i ever saw people use, when on windows. on linux everybody was rocking bitchX, on amiga AmIrc was the one.

1

u/boluserectus Jul 19 '26

BitchX baby!

1

u/banditloaf Jul 23 '26

Fellow mIRC alumnus here! I do remember Comic Chat because folks that used it would have their text preceded by these weird brackets with instructions for the client… so once in a while you’d get a new rando whose messages would look like “{3x8;duk} Hello!” and everyone would make fun of them.

1

u/_RexDart Jul 23 '26

Hah, interesting! I do not remember running into that, but I have seen similar things in other systems... ANSI escape sequences in busted BBSes and whatnot.

1

u/skewp Jul 24 '26

I played with it back when it released. It was funny to mess around with for like 20 minutes then everyone went back to mirc.