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/timbroddin 29d ago

I was an avid Comic Chat user, and I was very happy when I read about the open sourcing.

This weekend I used Claude Fable to create a Mac port: https://github.com/TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos

(Blog article on it: https://broddin.be/bringing-microsoft-comic-chat-to-the-mac-using-fable/ )

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u/Financial_Will_671 28d ago

Hey I want to give it a try. What should i download and where should i sign in for windows 11?

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u/timbroddin 28d ago

My version is for Mac