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.
MBCook•Jul 16, 2026
I think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.
superkuh•Jul 16, 2026
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.
brcmthrowaway•Jul 16, 2026
The creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.
ahartmetz•Jul 16, 2026
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)
dmd•Jul 16, 2026
Copilot means so many things now it doesn't even tell you anything about they do.
inigyou•Jul 16, 2026
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.
mossTechnician•Jul 16, 2026
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"
Of course, all of this is completely retarded.
bdsa•Jul 16, 2026
That's the article author Robert Standefer, I don't think he created Comic Chat, that was David Kurlander...
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.
98codes•Jul 16, 2026
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
mettamage•Jul 16, 2026
This is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)
thebeardisred•Jul 16, 2026
Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!
unfunco•Jul 16, 2026
Only tangentially related, but I'm convinced Comic Sans is the best font option available in Slack, and everyone should try it.
Cshaya•Jul 16, 2026
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
slylex•Jul 16, 2026
Comic Mono is the best code font and I will fight anyone who disagrees
ritonlajoie•Jul 16, 2026
This was my first introduction to internet
dmd•Jul 16, 2026
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
cube00•Jul 16, 2026
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.
cube00•Jul 16, 2026
SLM was at version 1.5 by 1988 and looking at chapter 5 suggests it had strong version number and external release management [1]
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
ndiddy•Jul 16, 2026
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.
Athas•Jul 16, 2026
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.
superkuh•Jul 16, 2026
Like,
># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)
stavros•Jul 16, 2026
It was the default, yes. I remember being hated when I joined chat rooms with it, even though I never changed any setting.
Sharlin•Jul 16, 2026
Microsoft SOP, especially back then.
art0rz•Jul 16, 2026
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.
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
cool_dude85•Jul 16, 2026
\me plays ahhhBeer.wav
Onavo•Jul 16, 2026
>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.
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...
Ack! It looks so… actionscript. Why does a UI look actionscript? I can’t even begin to imagine why it feels like that.
chromakode•Jul 16, 2026
For me it's the gradients and dark gray backgrounds.
whalesalad•Jul 16, 2026
The verdana font and virtually every element is misaligned in some way
AshamedCaptain•Jul 16, 2026
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.
artisinal•Jul 16, 2026
Back when software development was fun. And not the sloppy vibecoded corporate metrics pleaser it has become.
serf•Jul 16, 2026
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.
hedora•Jul 16, 2026
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.
Sharlin•Jul 16, 2026
Still, they managed to Embrace&Extend the IRC protocol in a way that was annoying to anyone not using Comic Chat.
CursedSilicon•Jul 16, 2026
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
johannes1234321•Jul 16, 2026
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.
guessbest•Jul 16, 2026
Thirty years old. Hard to believe
klondike_klive•Jul 16, 2026
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.
Kuyawa•Jul 16, 2026
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 ;-)
giancarlostoro•Jul 16, 2026
...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!
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."
outintospace•Jul 16, 2026
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.
cube00•Jul 16, 2026
> 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.
outintospace•Jul 16, 2026
Sorry to bring you down. I hope you can find joy in the rest of the work.
mrob•Jul 16, 2026
>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.
outintospace•Jul 16, 2026
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.
NDlurker•Jul 16, 2026
Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it
dartharva•Jul 16, 2026
Open source Windows NT instead
tsumnia•Jul 16, 2026
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)
EliRivers•Jul 16, 2026
A google search for the creator of the Comic Sans font, Vincent Connare, triggers a fun google Easter egg.
kridsdale1•Jul 16, 2026
Made me laugh.
dev_l1x_be•Jul 16, 2026
Rust/Go rewrite when?
treve•Jul 16, 2026
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.
elsig60•Jul 16, 2026
Nice. finally I will be abale to communicate with the new hires! LOL
_0xdd•Jul 16, 2026
This is very cool. Do V-Chat next!
crooked-v•Jul 16, 2026
So the real question is, when will somebody turn this into a Discord client?
37 Comments
I can't believe this is still going
Ran comic chat on a freshly installed Win98 (or 95, don’t remember) Pentium II.
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.
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)
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.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
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...
[1]: https://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SLM-1.5-Guides.p...
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
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.
># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)
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.
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
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.
https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I'll fork it and have fun with it again, with the help of AI of course ;-)
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...
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.
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 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 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)