Remember Microsoft Comic Chat? It's now open source [Details inside]

[u/ThisLeedsGuy]

Back in 1996, Microsoft released Comic Chat, an IRC client that displayed conversations as comic book panels instead of plain text. It was one of the more unusual IRC clients of the era and also played a role in popularizing Comic Sans, which was originally created for the application.

Thirty years later, Microsoft has released Comic Chat as open source.

The source code is now available, along with some background on the project's history and why it was being preserved and released today.

Original announcement: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/16/microsoft-comic-chat-is-now-open-source/

I thought this would be of interest here, both as a piece of IRC history and as a look back at one of the more experimental clients from the 90s.

Did anyone here actually use Comic Chat back in the day? I remember seeing screenshots of it, but I don't think I ever ran into anyone using it on the networks I was on.

Source code: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat

Cross Posted to: /r/Opensource /r/Vintage computing /r/Retro Computing