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Microsoft Comic Chat

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Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#31

Post by DonHopkins »

wrs wrote: post #11

Jim Woodring was such an odd, but wonderful, choice of artist for this project. I thought his surreal style worked so well as a visualization of what at the time was newly called “cyberspace”. This could have been a totally flavorless corporate thing instead.

You put it perfectly! I strongly agree and came here to say what you and ncmncm said first. He's one of my favorite and most surrealistic comic artists!

His web site is currently broken but it usually works, and has lots of awesome stuff on it. I've let him know, so I hope it will be back soon.

http://jimwoodring.com/ (EDIT: http://www.jimwoodring.com/ )

But in the meantime:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Woodring

...Oh wait, on second try: SOME variations of the url work and some don't:

http://jimwoodring.com/ and https://jimwoodring.com/ : broken with wordpress error messages

http://www.jimwoodring.com/ - works perfectly but just shows "jimwoodring.com" in the URL, but copying and pasting it gets http://www.jimwoodring.com/ -- is this a Chrome thing??!

https://www.jimwoodring.com/ - works halfway, you get the text without the pictures, which is no fun.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#35

Post by HeckFeck »

There are so many wild and wonderful things that came out of 90s Microsoft.

One favourite of mine is Microsoft Music Producer, I think it was called. You could select genres, styles, tempo and a band then it would 'compose' mid files. I used them to generate royalty-free music for silly animations.

Sadly even any mention of this is very hard to find online now. I recall there being an old website where one could download it along with extra music styles; that can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070222062521/http://www.musicm...

Edit: Changed the name to 'Microsoft Music Producer', as has been kindly identified below.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#36

Post by Crinus »

tech-historian wrote: post #20

Here's a list of 20+ discontinued Microsoft products in the realm of communications. Comic chat is on the list. https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

Interesting list, just learned about OE Classic (Outlook Express remake). Too bad it seems that it is the only alternative to the discontinued software in that list.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#37

Post by laumars »

I remember Comic Chat well. It was almost universally hated because many users would connect to normal IRC servers and Comic Chat sent it's own code (to describe the character expressions etc) which would flood the channel.

Comic Chat was even less popular online than mIRC users who posted coloured messages.

Even at the time I felt it was a great idea if only it played nicer with regular IRC networks+. Ironically it's one of the few occasions when Microsoft supported an open protocol by default when actually a propitiatory network might have made more sense.

+ actually that's possibly a lie because at that time I was writing my own IRC clients and bots and was well into the "l33t g33k" culture. So I might have hated Comic Chat just because of MS prejudices

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#38

Post by rubbingalcohol »

laumars wrote: post #37

I remember Comic Chat well. It was almost universally hated because many users would connect to normal IRC servers and Comic Chat sent it's own code (to describe the character expressions etc) which would flood the channel. Comic Chat was even less popular online than mIRC users who posted coloured messages. Even at the time I felt it was a great idea if only it played nicer with regular IRC networks+. Ironically it'…

I loved Comic Chat because I was 12 years old. I couldn't figure out what "lol" meant and it was really funny seeing the characters saying it with just a blank facial expression lol

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#39

Post by notadev »

We were still using this for classified chat in the Navy like 5 years ago. We didn't use the comic feature, just the normal IRC client. Eventually we followed other services and went to mIRC before the .gov paid some software company a ridiculous amount of money to make a very simple Java-based IRC client called Mako. It was like a software project you would do in an intermediate Java class, no bells and whistles. Ridiculous the amount of money available to SWEs who can navigate the contracting process.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat

#40

Post by spoppy »

HeckFeck wrote: post #35

There are so many wild and wonderful things that came out of 90s Microsoft. One favourite of mine is Microsoft Music Producer, I think it was called. You could select genres, styles, tempo and a band then it would 'compose' mid files. I used them to generate royalty-free music for silly animations. Sadly even any mention of this is very hard to find online now. I recall there being an old website where one could down…

Do you mean SongSmith? That wasn't 1990s, more like 2009, but made quite a splash at the time with their famous video commercial.

http://songsmith.ms/

https://youtu.be/3oGFogwcx-E

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