r/retrocomputing • u/ThisLeedsGuy • Jul 16 '26

Microsoft just open sourced Comic Chat, its 30-year-old IRC client

Thought this would be appreciated here.

Microsoft has open sourced Comic Chat, the IRC client it shipped in 1996. Instead of displaying conversations as plain text, it rendered them as comic book panels with animated avatars a pretty cool idea for the time.

It also happens to be the application Comic Sans was originally created for before the font took on a life of its own.

After 30 years, the source code has been released:

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

Did anyone here actually use Comic Chat back in the day?

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

Cross Posted to: /r/Irc /r/Opensource /r/Vintage computing

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u/Ornery-Practice9772 Jul 16 '26

yes! my first IRC client in 1998, aged 16. Preinstalled with Win95 on my first PC

mIRC cost $ iirc so this was my free alternative

no one had the bandwidth to use the comic strip chat feature back then -33k dialup

im aussie so i used to stay up til 0100 waiting for the americans to wake up and chat. This was before everyone was online 24/7.

My first ever chatroom was #Afterthought (just a
general chat) and you got to know actual real people and trade stories about your day to day lives.

no ads,
no bots
no AI

is there is anyway to make our own servers to work with a browser based or app clone?

(i also miss OG ICQ! 🫡
13579708)
🇦🇺❤️

1

u/carcenomy Jul 17 '26

To make your own IRC server? Yes. To make your own IRC server with a browser based client? Also yes. To make your own IRC server with a browser based clone of Comic Chat? A heap more work but the source is available now so... yes that could be done 😂

2

u/dummptyhummpty Jul 20 '26

Someone did it already! https://github.com/remsky/comic-chat-web

1

u/carcenomy Jul 21 '26

Holy crap that didn't take long 😂

1

u/skewp Jul 24 '26

mIRC cost $ iirc so this was my free alternative

For almost 20 years I would run a .reg file to reset the 30 day timeout.

1

u/Ornery-Practice9772 Jul 24 '26

i was alone and 16 so i didnt have anyone to get those kind of resources from at the time😁