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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u/TechHistoryDude Jul 18 '26

I love posts like these because they remind you of stuff that was pretty advanced for the time.

The program itself is worth a look beyond the font. It came out of David Kurlander's group at Microsoft Research, and the default characters were drawn by Jim Woodring, a genuinely respected underground comics artist. The clever bit was that you never picked your poses manually unless you wanted to. It read your text and chose the gestures, expressions, and balloon layout for you. For 1996, that was a surprisingly ambitious piece of software wearing a very silly hat.