Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally.
I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.
I take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.
What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?").
I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress!
However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc.
First of all: I wrote that I welcome the open sourcing of this code. It was literally the first sentence. I wrote it specifically for reactions like that.
They embraced the Internet; in this case IRC. This followed Bill Gates' well-publicised memo "The Internet Tidal Wave" a year earlier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet...). It didn't happen because "someone at MS made a fun IRC client".
They extended the open IRC protocol with proprietary extensions hidden inside CTCP (Client-to-Client Protocol) messages to support "the fun stuff": https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20... (you need to be logged in to Microsoft's Github for code search to work nowadays.)
The outcome of this effort: Comic Chat was interoperable with regular IRC clients, but when two Comic Chat users connected, they could see richer interactions.
It probably eventually wasn't deemed important enough for that phase. In 1999 when Comic Chat ended they pivoted to their completely proprietary MSN Messenger service instead, with a stronger focus on individual-to-individual. This came after ICQ (1996) and AIM (1997).
MSN was aimed at, well AIM, to the point where AIM used protocol flaws to block MSN clients. And it doesn't track that they'd just abandon IRC considering it was a period of absolutely massive growth for the protocol. It's more likely there was no intent to EEE IRC.
Yeah, that's right, it was all Microsoft's evil plan to extinguish proper serious legitimate grown-up fonts by rolling out Comic Sans.
JFC dude, the US Government is being taken over by narcissistic fascists, currenty embracing, extending, and extinguishing Democracy itself, and you chose this hill to die on.
It doesn’t even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I’m famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I’m in your signs. I’m in your browsers. I’m in your instant messengers. I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature, and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book-inspired, sans-serif badassery.
Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.
Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.
Comic chat was a phenomenal pain in the arse in the 90s for any IRC channel :P But it's still such a great and important piece of IRC history as a whole. It's amazing cool to see it open sourced and preserved this way.
It's amazing to see people do a tonne of work to get things like this and 3D Movie Maker - open sourced. I'd never thought I'd see the day!
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...
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.
I have to imagine the answer was either "dedicated MSCC servers and EEE" depending on your level of cynicism or "it was just a tech demo that escaped".
On the IRC servers I managed I always set up an automatic kick when one of these messages was sent anywhere on the servers. It would ban after 3 kicks, which was a necessary change from the immediate ban as legitimate users got curious sometimes and installed Comic Chat.
It was fun messing with these folks, though, since they were often oblivious to IRC and internet culture in general. Or they were just completely tech illiterate, but somehow ended up starting Comic Chat, and somehow ended up on our obscure servers.
I was one of these hapless Comic Chat users. Luckily someone gently nudged me toward a real IRC client lol. I was an absolute IRC fiend for years after that.
Comic Chat inspired me to make multiplayer games with IRC as the lobby server. But I specifically did not do what Microsoft did and send the metadata through the public channel, because I too had gone through the public ridicule of using Comic Chat. Instead, I used DMs between users to perform the signaling (which would then open a socket to create a direct TCP connection between the players).
It was pretty easy to do. Had to have been, because I was a pretty terrible programmer at the time.
How far we’ve sunk! Back then we got irritated by attempts to use open systems, nowadays a system like this would use a closed proprietary system from day one.
MS encroaching on existing protocol and behaviors then making a mess is well established patterns, Outlook defaulting to answering to e-mail on top is one of these atrocities
> The early web was filled with experimentation. “What if chat rooms looked like comics?” That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98.
This really resonated with me. Too much development work today feels like colouring in predefined boxes. Love to see some software that thought way out of the box and got institutional support.
Modems were slow and a monthly cost that tied up people’s phone lines. This was another way to get people online. It wasn’t a given thing that we think of nowadays.
> HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL, interj. An all-purpose sound, denoting the act of performing oral sex, the act of receiving oral sex, taking drugs, writing your Congressman, misdialing your party and getting that annoying series of tones, or sitting perfectly still and making no noise whatsoever.
Oh man, I remember this from when I was in college. I didn't really realize it was IRC, and so I thought everybody else in the chat rooms was using it and saw the visualizations.
30 years later and I still cringe at the memories. (The problem was not the client, it was me, heh.)
This is not a font (like Comic Sans) but was an actual application (to make comics from IRC chats) that was shipped with Windows 98. The application got open sourced.. https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
One of my first ever gigs was writing comedy sketches for a BBC digital channel using MS Comic Chat, which they filmed as if it were a super low frame rate cartoon. The most incredibly cheap TV. I think we (my writing/performing partners and I) generated a few hours of usable footage for them and got paid about 50 quid each.
I still bring that up when I get to discussing the weird days of the Internet when it felt like people were just trying all kinds of things left and right.
...for years I've talked about this program here on HN! This is exciting for me, I will definitely be downloading and perusing the code when I get back home from vacation. Thank you to the original developers, and to the current team at Microsoft that made this release possible!
I have a vivid memory of my sister and my mom in Puerto Rico, on our packardbell computer, hearing it making dial-up noises for days or hours, until they finally got online. I also remember seeing my sister using that program in the 90s, I must have been 5 to 7 years old, she was a teenager.
Fun fact, it's an IRC client that injects its own schema and then other Comic Chat IRC compatible clients interpret it and display it. You can go on freenet (DONT GO INTO POPULATED CHANNELS!) and go into like #hn-comic-chat or something and others who join will see what you see!
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 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 also apparently "rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022"[0], causing a lot of confusion about what "Microsoft 365 Copilot" on their homepage meant, but I think it would translate to "Cloud Office Suite + Cloud AI"
Microsoft 365 means Microsoft Online, according to the translator. And it makes sense: they are positioning Office as their core product, not just one of many products. They are renaming Microsoft Office to just Microsoft; this is the online version (which happens to be the only version); and it has AI, which they are prominently showcasing. Hence, Microsoft 365 Copilot. It means "Microsoft Online, now with AI"
You do know that using the word "retarded" is a shibboleth that means you're a MAGA asshole and you want everyone to know it, not just a 12-year-old boy in 1992. Wanna see if you can get away with using the n-word and the f-word now, edgelord?
If you don't want people to believe you're racist or homophobic or ableist, then don't give them such strong evidence by using the n-word or the f-word or the r-word. It's as simple as that, and nobody's fault but your own if you're "misunderstood" or suddenly claim to be the "real victim of free speech suppression".
wtf is this nonsense? Compared to the OP I personally think you are the one who needs help, or at least stop consuming media from whatever sources you are consuming right now,
That is correct. DJ Kurlander is the creator of Comic Chat and he is credited in the blog post. I'm just the guy that made the open source release happen, with DJ's support. He retired from Microsoft 20+ years ago.
>Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
One other place: We shipped The Sims 1 using Comic Sans, and it did ok.
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
That text would have sounded a whole lot more convincing if it had actually used Comic Sans...
EDIT: turns out it actually does, or it tries to. The paragraphs have "font-family:'Comic Sans', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Marker Felt';". But, as a Comic Sans hating Linux user, I of course don't have the first two installed, and no idea what this Marker Felt he is speaking of is! He could have used a Comic Sans lookalike webfont, or at least added a generic "sans-serif" fallback, but since he didn't, the browser falls back to a serif font.
Obviously he was just passive-aggressively trolling GNU/Linux users, because he mistakenly thought that 2010 was finally The Year of the Linux Desktop. At least he got you to go "View Source".
If you use eww to browse the web like rms, you can put this in your .emacs file:
(set-face-attribute 'default nil
:family "Comic Sans MS"
:height 420)
Publishing various versions of the code in a version control system repository as separate directories living on the same branch is an interesting choice.
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]
While I shouldn't complain because they just won't do these releases in the future and I accept it was a different time; I still find it surprising Microsoft didn't have better version control considering they took it seriously enough to build their own internal version control system (SLM). [2]
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.
Microsoft made a product based on SLM called Delta[0]. I'd never heard of it until that Youtube video came up.
SLM's "architecture" reminds me a lot of Microsoft Mail postoffices-- a file share that every user interacts with and no actual server-side code (i.e. just using file sharing semantics for clients to interact). (Lots of apps, not just MSFT, did that back in the 90s and it was _hell_.)
Based on what I've read about source control at Microsoft I'd guess Comic Chat straddled the use of both SLM and Source Depot (post W2K, from what I've seen).
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
There's a reason why Microsoft didn't use SourceSafe internally, it was an awful version control system even compared to what else was available at the time (CVS and whatnot). For example, it didn't support the concept of "atomic commits". If you tried to commit multiple files at once and one failed to merge, the repo would just update the files that successfully merged and then the developer would have to fix the conflicts and try to commit again. Additionally, if you deleted a file, it would give the option to "permanently delete" it. If you checked this, it would completely remove the file from all past commits. VSS would also randomly corrupt files and the way to fix this was by permanently deleting the file from the repo and then re-adding it. The combination of these factors meant that VSS could not reliably show what the state of the codebase was at a given point in time, which is one of the main reasons for using version control in the first place. I sometimes do software archival work and it's fairly common that you'll find a VSS repo for a project and then you can't compile any commits older than a few weeks because of missing files.
> it was an awful version control system even compared to what else was available at the time (CVS and whatnot). For example, it didn't support the concept of "atomic commits".
Neither did CVS. That was one of the big sellers of Subversion (maybe even the seller)
CVS in essence was just remote access to RCS files, where each file was handled independently, which caused lots of trouble to recover a specific state of work, especially when including deleted (or even worse: replaced) files.
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.
>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.
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.
Microsoft was at one of its' most powerful evil phases it had ever seen during that phase, and to pretend it was some kind of antithesis to 'corporate metric please' is a disservice to history.
I liked comic chat , and I see that your actual point is more just "ai bad" , but 88-99 microsoft was brutally corporate metric pleasing.
see also :
Microsoft antitrust history
Microsoft FTC investigation 1990
Microsoft DOJ antitrust 1993
Microsoft 1994 consent decree
Microsoft anticompetitive licensing
Microsoft per-processor licensing
Microsoft consent decree Judge Stanley Sporkin
Microsoft vaporware antitrust
Microsoft market foreclosure 1990s
Gary Kildall Microsoft controversy
Stac Electronics / DoubleSpace
Microsoft Stac Electronics lawsuit
Microsoft DoubleSpace patent infringement
Microsoft Intuit acquisition antitrust
feels like selling an old bicycle on craigslist with the amount of things you can tag M$ with.
This came out of Microsoft Research, which was a bit of a safe haven from such stuff back then.
MSN Chat was the full corporate bundled with windows program that matches your description of ‘90s Microsoft. A non-monetized chat app targeting decentralized protocols definitely was not.
Depressing to see all the AI-generated text in an article about a creative communication tool. Even the comic's punchline is clunky, and no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy."
I wrote that, not AI. There's a typo: it was supposed to be, "Is the Space Jam guy still playing baseball?" I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
> I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
It's depressing that even a blog post about open sourcing a two decade old piece of software has such a hard deadline the author feels pressured to publish before they're ready.
>no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy."
Maybe not in the USA, but globally I think it's likely that more people watched Space Jam than ever watched an NBA match. Professional basketball is a niche sport in most of the world.
Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally.
I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.
Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it
I used it to create a presentation for my talk at a conference last year. https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html
I take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.
What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?").
I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress!
…and it's also entirely in character of you representing Microsoft to not reply to my comment :-)
T DEUCE ME TOO HUGALUGAHGLGHLAHALHGGGGG
https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/
HLAGHAGHLAGHLAGH
On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it.
You should (I assume it's Rands), he clearly does not want to be rembered as a Jerkcity guy now that he's a Serious Palantir Poobah.
I wonder if bong hits ever helped him with his Makefile.
I once worked with nearly all of those guys! A very interesting bunch....
Jerk City lives on, and is now known as Bonequest. Here's today's comic:
https://www.bonequest.com/
Wow just about to hit 10k comics too.
No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them.
Man those are absolutely deranged. Awesome.
Open sourcing code is always welcome.
However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc.
Why is it every time some company people hate does anything good, no matter how trivial, people have to trash it?
Someone at MS made a fun IRC client. Thats it. It’s a WILDLY different world than 30 years ago and MS is a different company.
They released old code for those interested. Celebrate it.
First of all: I wrote that I welcome the open sourcing of this code. It was literally the first sentence. I wrote it specifically for reactions like that.
They embraced the Internet; in this case IRC. This followed Bill Gates' well-publicised memo "The Internet Tidal Wave" a year earlier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet...). It didn't happen because "someone at MS made a fun IRC client".
They extended the open IRC protocol with proprietary extensions hidden inside CTCP (Client-to-Client Protocol) messages to support "the fun stuff": https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20... (you need to be logged in to Microsoft's Github for code search to work nowadays.)
The outcome of this effort: Comic Chat was interoperable with regular IRC clients, but when two Comic Chat users connected, they could see richer interactions.
So where's the extinguish? You can't stop proving your point halfway through unless you're implying you did not actually have a point.
It probably eventually wasn't deemed important enough for that phase. In 1999 when Comic Chat ended they pivoted to their completely proprietary MSN Messenger service instead, with a stronger focus on individual-to-individual. This came after ICQ (1996) and AIM (1997).
Apples and oranges.
MSN was aimed at, well AIM, to the point where AIM used protocol flaws to block MSN clients. And it doesn't track that they'd just abandon IRC considering it was a period of absolutely massive growth for the protocol. It's more likely there was no intent to EEE IRC.
You put one sentence in saying it was good, then the rest of the (admittedly short) ent complaining about behavior from 30 years ago.
Why does it matter to today? It just makes your first sentence feel like a backhanded compliment.
Yeah, that's right, it was all Microsoft's evil plan to extinguish proper serious legitimate grown-up fonts by rolling out Comic Sans.
JFC dude, the US Government is being taken over by narcissistic fascists, currenty embracing, extending, and extinguishing Democracy itself, and you chose this hill to die on.
It doesn’t even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I’m famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I’m in your signs. I’m in your browsers. I’m in your instant messengers. I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature, and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book-inspired, sans-serif badassery.
Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
Ha! I didn't get the reference at first but hilarious...
They're calling it "the most Hacker News comment of all time"
Amazing timing, Jerkcity hits 10,000 strips in like two weeks.
Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.
Man I hadn’t even thought of MSN Gaming Zone again until now yet spent who knows how many hours on it.
amazing i'd love to have the hardware to run this
Really nice work! This is so very very cool.
Comic chat was a phenomenal pain in the arse in the 90s for any IRC channel :P But it's still such a great and important piece of IRC history as a whole. It's amazing cool to see it open sourced and preserved this way.
It's amazing to see people do a tonne of work to get things like this and 3D Movie Maker - open sourced. I'd never thought I'd see the day!
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
Ack! It looks so… actionscript. Why does a UI look actionscript? I can’t even begin to imagine why it feels like that.
For me it's the gradients and dark gray backgrounds.
The verdana font and virtually every element is misaligned in some way
Haha, yes flex apps definitely had a feel to them!
It's easy to criticize but remember, this was back in the days of supporting IE6 and XHR was still relatively new!
Flex's standard UI library was filled with bluish-gray gradients and verdana :)
Here's an article which has a screenshot with a bunch of controls: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-application...
Aw, I miss Flex. It made so much sense to me.
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)
It was the default, yes. I remember being hated when I joined chat rooms with it, even though I never changed any setting.
Microsoft SOP, especially back then.
Yes, I really wonder how they expected people would react to that.
Comic Chat had its own IRC servers ran by Microsoft. You weren't supposed to use it on "regular" servers.
Nah it was just the default server in the dropdown list. Out of the box it also supported UnderNet, IRCNet, and more.
I have to imagine the answer was either "dedicated MSCC servers and EEE" depending on your level of cynicism or "it was just a tech demo that escaped".
On the IRC servers I managed I always set up an automatic kick when one of these messages was sent anywhere on the servers. It would ban after 3 kicks, which was a necessary change from the immediate ban as legitimate users got curious sometimes and installed Comic Chat.
It was fun messing with these folks, though, since they were often oblivious to IRC and internet culture in general. Or they were just completely tech illiterate, but somehow ended up starting Comic Chat, and somehow ended up on our obscure servers.
I was one of these hapless Comic Chat users. Luckily someone gently nudged me toward a real IRC client lol. I was an absolute IRC fiend for years after that.
Comic Chat inspired me to make multiplayer games with IRC as the lobby server. But I specifically did not do what Microsoft did and send the metadata through the public channel, because I too had gone through the public ridicule of using Comic Chat. Instead, I used DMs between users to perform the signaling (which would then open a socket to create a direct TCP connection between the players).
It was pretty easy to do. Had to have been, because I was a pretty terrible programmer at the time.
One of the charming parts of IRC is just how simple it is to do things with it. Much is lost in more featureful protocols.
How far we’ve sunk! Back then we got irritated by attempts to use open systems, nowadays a system like this would use a closed proprietary system from day one.
How dare they pay an artist like Jim Woodring to draw cartoons for them! All art should be free!
MS encroaching on existing protocol and behaviors then making a mess is well established patterns, Outlook defaulting to answering to e-mail on top is one of these atrocities
> The early web was filled with experimentation. “What if chat rooms looked like comics?” That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98.
This really resonated with me. Too much development work today feels like colouring in predefined boxes. Love to see some software that thought way out of the box and got institutional support.
Weird stuff and “what if we just tried it?”
No kidding.
“After we get through round 3 what’s our exit strategy?”
“Exit strategy? It’s a tiki head on IRC. No one is paying us anything. Just enjoy it.”
Modems were slow and a monthly cost that tied up people’s phone lines. This was another way to get people online. It wasn’t a given thing that we think of nowadays.
Great idea. Got it running on the web. Come hang :) https://chat.elsewhere.zone/
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
Waste of time like upgrading Notepad but but we don't have calendar on dual-screen monitor since win11 came out.
https://bonequest.com/
HAGHLUABLABG
I can't believe this is still going
> HAGHLUABLABG
??
https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/page/119/mo...
> HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL, interj. An all-purpose sound, denoting the act of performing oral sex, the act of receiving oral sex, taking drugs, writing your Congressman, misdialing your party and getting that annoying series of tones, or sitting perfectly still and making no noise whatsoever.
I believe this is what the tags call "cocksucking-noises".
https://www.bonequest.com/tags/cocksucking-noises
(To solve the CAPTCHA: "spigot" is the human face.)
Ahhh jerkcity. A classic.
Blocked in UK
Only if you're on O2 or 3 and haven't disabled the adult content filter.
Rands is a programmer/PM IRL: https://randsinrepose.com/
There's an interesting easter egg in semantic.cpp, line 77:
Apparently, if your text contains the word "OXio", it triggers the following riddle: What's round on the ends and hi in the middle?
Awesome find. :)
Guessing the X was to disable it without disabling it.
Back when eastereggs were semi-allowed in MS software. Shame it is being discouraged or disallowed.
Totally understand it from a security and maintenance perspective, but things were more fun back then.
Someone wants to taste the curb!
https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
Oh man, I remember this from when I was in college. I didn't really realize it was IRC, and so I thought everybody else in the chat rooms was using it and saw the visualizations.
30 years later and I still cringe at the memories. (The problem was not the client, it was me, heh.)
Direct link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
I'm fascinated that I have never heard of this, even though I did use IRC during that early 2000s era.
In my mind it had mostly come and gone by then. I don’t think it was ever very popular.
But I remember it fondly.
This is not a font (like Comic Sans) but was an actual application (to make comics from IRC chats) that was shipped with Windows 98. The application got open sourced.. https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
A google search for the creator of the Comic Sans font, Vincent Connare, triggers a fun google Easter egg.
Made me laugh.
One of my first ever gigs was writing comedy sketches for a BBC digital channel using MS Comic Chat, which they filmed as if it were a super low frame rate cartoon. The most incredibly cheap TV. I think we (my writing/performing partners and I) generated a few hours of usable footage for them and got paid about 50 quid each.
Only tangentially related, but I'm convinced Comic Sans is the best font option available in Slack, and everyone should try it.
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
Comic Mono is the best code font and I will fight anyone who disagrees
Back when people had a sense of humour and just wanted to sully your chat log.
i use Comic Mono in my terminal :) (comic chat probably isn't monospace)
https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/
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.
I remember Comic Chat
I still bring that up when I get to discussing the weird days of the Internet when it felt like people were just trying all kinds of things left and right.
Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!
Nice, I just made an IRC app that loads comic chat files a few weeks ago.
I added some updates, ignore bots, new expressions, diff message bubble behavior, more panels, custom avatars, colors, etc.
https://github.com/IronWolve/MaxChat
...for years I've talked about this program here on HN! This is exciting for me, I will definitely be downloading and perusing the code when I get back home from vacation. Thank you to the original developers, and to the current team at Microsoft that made this release possible!
I have a vivid memory of my sister and my mom in Puerto Rico, on our packardbell computer, hearing it making dial-up noises for days or hours, until they finally got online. I also remember seeing my sister using that program in the 90s, I must have been 5 to 7 years old, she was a teenager.
Fun fact, it's an IRC client that injects its own schema and then other Comic Chat IRC compatible clients interpret it and display it. You can go on freenet (DONT GO INTO POPULATED CHANNELS!) and go into like #hn-comic-chat or something and others who join will see what you see!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Libera.chat instead of freenode. Also, Bitlbee.org's public servers against your own Jabber and Mastodon accounts and the like.
This is awesome. Is there some way we could replace the MS Teams meeting Facilitator with this?
When somebody inevitably LLM this to rust/zig/bling/zork/vupt; please drop a link!
...and we shall then see just how incredibly bloated software has become.
I'm afraid Zig passed its shelf life and self immolated.
Zig's creator can't stop himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAjNWanR3n8
ew Theo's words mean absolute jack** though, he's just a grade A a*hole attention grabbers.
Jerk City sends its regards
It's New to me. I love comics. Hypothetically speaking if I drew my comic will I be able to post it in here.
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)
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 also apparently "rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022"[0], causing a lot of confusion about what "Microsoft 365 Copilot" on their homepage meant, but I think it would translate to "Cloud Office Suite + Cloud AI"
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
Microsoft 365 means Microsoft Online, according to the translator. And it makes sense: they are positioning Office as their core product, not just one of many products. They are renaming Microsoft Office to just Microsoft; this is the online version (which happens to be the only version); and it has AI, which they are prominently showcasing. Hence, Microsoft 365 Copilot. It means "Microsoft Online, now with AI"
Of course, all of this is completely retarded.
You do know that using the word "retarded" is a shibboleth that means you're a MAGA asshole and you want everyone to know it, not just a 12-year-old boy in 1992. Wanna see if you can get away with using the n-word and the f-word now, edgelord?
If you don't want people to believe you're racist or homophobic or ableist, then don't give them such strong evidence by using the n-word or the f-word or the r-word. It's as simple as that, and nobody's fault but your own if you're "misunderstood" or suddenly claim to be the "real victim of free speech suppression".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Disabilities Beat: Are Trump, other elected officials, alienating voters by using the ‘r-word’?
https://www.wamc.org/2025-12-03/disabilities-beat-are-trump-...
wtf is this nonsense? Compared to the OP I personally think you are the one who needs help, or at least stop consuming media from whatever sources you are consuming right now,
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.
That is correct. DJ Kurlander is the creator of Comic Chat and he is credited in the blog post. I'm just the guy that made the open source release happen, with DJ's support. He retired from Microsoft 20+ years ago.
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
Thanks for sharing the link. I built that site. :)
Microsoft Comic Chat - the only place where using Comic Sans is appropriate
I'm Comic Sans, asshole!
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
>Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
One other place: We shipped The Sims 1 using Comic Sans, and it did ok.
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...
The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-1-crowd-sitter-1f478b...
> I'm Comic Sans, asshole! https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
That text would have sounded a whole lot more convincing if it had actually used Comic Sans...
EDIT: turns out it actually does, or it tries to. The paragraphs have "font-family:'Comic Sans', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Marker Felt';". But, as a Comic Sans hating Linux user, I of course don't have the first two installed, and no idea what this Marker Felt he is speaking of is! He could have used a Comic Sans lookalike webfont, or at least added a generic "sans-serif" fallback, but since he didn't, the browser falls back to a serif font.
Obviously he was just passive-aggressively trolling GNU/Linux users, because he mistakenly thought that 2010 was finally The Year of the Linux Desktop. At least he got you to go "View Source".
If you use eww to browse the web like rms, you can put this in your .emacs file:
Publishing various versions of the code in a version control system repository as separate directories living on the same branch is an interesting choice.
While I shouldn't complain because they just won't do these releases in the future and I accept it was a different time; I still find it surprising Microsoft didn't have better version control considering they took it seriously enough to build their own internal version control system (SLM). [2]
[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.
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...
Microsoft made a product based on SLM called Delta[0]. I'd never heard of it until that Youtube video came up.
SLM's "architecture" reminds me a lot of Microsoft Mail postoffices-- a file share that every user interacts with and no actual server-side code (i.e. just using file sharing semantics for clients to interact). (Lots of apps, not just MSFT, did that back in the 90s and it was _hell_.)
Based on what I've read about source control at Microsoft I'd guess Comic Chat straddled the use of both SLM and Source Depot (post W2K, from what I've seen).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM
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
There's a reason why Microsoft didn't use SourceSafe internally, it was an awful version control system even compared to what else was available at the time (CVS and whatnot). For example, it didn't support the concept of "atomic commits". If you tried to commit multiple files at once and one failed to merge, the repo would just update the files that successfully merged and then the developer would have to fix the conflicts and try to commit again. Additionally, if you deleted a file, it would give the option to "permanently delete" it. If you checked this, it would completely remove the file from all past commits. VSS would also randomly corrupt files and the way to fix this was by permanently deleting the file from the repo and then re-adding it. The combination of these factors meant that VSS could not reliably show what the state of the codebase was at a given point in time, which is one of the main reasons for using version control in the first place. I sometimes do software archival work and it's fairly common that you'll find a VSS repo for a project and then you can't compile any commits older than a few weeks because of missing files.
> it was an awful version control system even compared to what else was available at the time (CVS and whatnot). For example, it didn't support the concept of "atomic commits".
Neither did CVS. That was one of the big sellers of Subversion (maybe even the seller)
CVS in essence was just remote access to RCS files, where each file was handled independently, which caused lots of trouble to recover a specific state of work, especially when including deleted (or even worse: replaced) files.
Thanks for the correction, I had a brain fart and wrote CVS instead of SVN.
That's what it was, wasn't it? You checked out some files and that locked them against other changes, then when you were done you checked in.
I was around 16 when I discovered this, and it was my first IRC client. Didn't fully get what IRC was yet. It felt like a new world opening up.
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.
This is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)
Thanks for the artifact :D
I look forward to seeing someone use this as a pipeline for AI video creation (and I don't see that as a bad thing fyi)
Impressed that they actually hired Jim Woodring to help with the original.
I still think this project has potential.
This was my first introduction to internet
I was fascinated by this as a young teenager. I still love it
I think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.
The folks at Jerk City will be very happy.
https://www.jerkcity.com/9981
Need a Teams integration, stat
Related. You can make XKCD style comics easily with this web-app and library called cmx.js
https://orsenthil.github.io/cmx.js/
https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2026/06/17/xkcd-dia...
Still better chat experience than MS Teams
This is very cool. Do V-Chat next!
I was just thinking the same thing. I spent so much time with Comic Chat and V-Chat. V-Chat was mind blowing as a kid.
Thirty years old. Hard to believe
HURF DURF
Open source Windows NT instead
whynotboth.gif
Rust/Go rewrite when?
Merge this with the public servers of https://bitlbee.org to use Jabber or Mastodon servers (among others) with it.
So the real question is, when will somebody turn this into a Discord client?
>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.
Nice. finally I will be abale to communicate with the new hires! LOL
\me plays ahhhBeer.wav
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.
URL works fine for me using Safari on a non-corporate Mac. You may have jumped to conclusions a little precipitously.
Extend, embrace
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
I loved Comic Chat, countless good memories when dial up was still a thing.
I'll fork it and have fun with it again, with the help of AI of course ;-)
Back when software development was fun. And not the sloppy vibecoded corporate metrics pleaser it has become.
this was released in 1996.
Microsoft was at one of its' most powerful evil phases it had ever seen during that phase, and to pretend it was some kind of antithesis to 'corporate metric please' is a disservice to history.
I liked comic chat , and I see that your actual point is more just "ai bad" , but 88-99 microsoft was brutally corporate metric pleasing.
see also : Microsoft antitrust history Microsoft FTC investigation 1990 Microsoft DOJ antitrust 1993 Microsoft 1994 consent decree Microsoft anticompetitive licensing Microsoft per-processor licensing Microsoft consent decree Judge Stanley Sporkin Microsoft vaporware antitrust Microsoft market foreclosure 1990s Gary Kildall Microsoft controversy Stac Electronics / DoubleSpace Microsoft Stac Electronics lawsuit Microsoft DoubleSpace patent infringement Microsoft Intuit acquisition antitrust
feels like selling an old bicycle on craigslist with the amount of things you can tag M$ with.
This came out of Microsoft Research, which was a bit of a safe haven from such stuff back then.
MSN Chat was the full corporate bundled with windows program that matches your description of ‘90s Microsoft. A non-monetized chat app targeting decentralized protocols definitely was not.
Still, they managed to Embrace&Extend the IRC protocol in a way that was annoying to anyone not using Comic Chat.
Microsoft was a massive corporation
To imply that every single person there was evil to their core simply by association is utterly ridiculous.
I doubt the guy who created Minesweeper was dreaming of world domination while working there
The fish stinks from the head. And yes, some departments have some freedom and some good people.
But it was in the timeframe where the "browser wars" gained momentum, where Microsoft Network tried to "Microsoftify" the Internet etc.
Even if it was a research project by research focussed people it fit in the bigger strategy and gave a friendly face.
Depressing to see all the AI-generated text in an article about a creative communication tool. Even the comic's punchline is clunky, and no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy."
I wrote that, not AI. There's a typo: it was supposed to be, "Is the Space Jam guy still playing baseball?" I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
> I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
It's depressing that even a blog post about open sourcing a two decade old piece of software has such a hard deadline the author feels pressured to publish before they're ready.
Sorry to bring you down. I hope you can find joy in the rest of the work.
>no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy."
Maybe not in the USA, but globally I think it's likely that more people watched Space Jam than ever watched an NBA match. Professional basketball is a niche sport in most of the world.
Well, everyone knows about MJ in Europe even if they never saw a basketball match ever (outside school OFC) because of his sneakers.