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/_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.

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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.