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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
>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.
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.
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.
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.
...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)
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 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"
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.
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.
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
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Like,
># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)
Microsoft SOP, especially back then.
It was the default, yes. I remember being hated when I joined chat rooms with it, even though I never changed any setting.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
Someone wants to taste the curb!
https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
https://bonequest.com/
Ahhh jerkcity. A classic.
Rands is a programmer/PM IRL: https://randsinrepose.com/
HAGHLUABLABG
I can't believe this is still going
Blocked in UK
Only if you're on O2 or 3 and haven't disabled the adult content filter.
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.
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
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.
A google search for the creator of the Comic Sans font, Vincent Connare, triggers a fun google Easter egg.
Made me laugh.
Direct link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
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."
>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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!
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
Rust/Go rewrite when?
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.
...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...
Jerk City sends its regards
This was my first introduction to internet
Thirty years old. Hard to believe
I think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.
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)
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
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.
[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.
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.
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
I still think this project has potential.
This is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)
Open source Windows NT instead
Extend, embrace
>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
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 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 ;-)