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Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#13

The creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.

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)

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#17

The creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.

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)

Copilot means so many things now it doesn't even tell you anything about they do.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#18

  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]

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%2...

[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#19
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.

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