Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#51

Post by stavros » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

Athas wrote: post #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, rath…

It was the default, yes. I remember being hated when I joined chat rooms with it, even though I never changed any setting.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#52

Post by klondike_klive » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

One of my first ever gigs was writing comedy sketches for a BBC digital channel using MS Comic Chat, which they filmed as if it were a super low frame rate cartoon. The most incredibly cheap TV. I think we (my writing/performing partners and I) generated a few hours of usable footage for them and got paid about 50 quid each.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#53

Post by mossTechnician » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #30

dmd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was explained to me that the word "Copilot" is just Microsoft's brand for what the rest of us call "AI" - just like "365" means "online", "Azure" means "cloud", "Entra" means "login" and ".NET" used to mean "with a computer". So when you see something like "Azure Copilot 365" you can pretend they wrote, fully generically, "Online Cloud AI". If you see a button labelled "Copilot" you understand it would've said "AI…

Microsoft also apparently "rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022"[0], causing a lot of confusion about what "Microsoft 365 Copilot" on their homepage meant, but I think it would translate to "Cloud Office Suite + Cloud AI"

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#54

Post by Kuyawa » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

I loved Comic Chat, countless good memories when dial up was still a thing.

I'll fork it and have fun with it again, with the help of AI of course ;-)

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#55

Post by hedora » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #49

artisinal wrote: post #48

Back when software development was fun. And not the sloppy vibecoded corporate metrics pleaser it has become.

this was released in 1996. Microsoft was at one of its' most powerful evil phases it had ever seen during that phase, and to pretend it was some kind of antithesis to 'corporate metric please' is a disservice to history. I liked comic chat , and I see that your actual point is more just "ai bad" , but 88-99 microsoft was brutally corporate metric pleasing. see also : Microsoft antitrust history Microsoft FTC investig…

This came out of Microsoft Research, which was a bit of a safe haven from such stuff back then.

MSN Chat was the full corporate bundled with windows program that matches your description of ‘90s Microsoft. A non-monetized chat app targeting decentralized protocols definitely was not.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#56

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

...for years I've talked about this program here on HN! This is exciting for me, I will definitely be downloading and perusing the code when I get back home from vacation. Thank you to the original developers, and to the current team at Microsoft that made this release possible!

I have a vivid memory of my sister and my mom in Puerto Rico, on our packardbell computer, hearing it making dial-up noises for days or hours, until they finally got online. I also remember seeing my sister using that program in the 90s, I must have been 5 to 7 years old, she was a teenager.

Fun fact, it's an IRC client that injects its own schema and then other Comic Chat IRC compatible clients interpret it and display it. You can go on freenet (DONT GO INTO POPULATED CHANNELS!) and go into like #hn-comic-chat or something and others who join will see what you see!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#57

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #26

Athas wrote: post #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, rath…

Like, ># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#58

Post by ndiddy » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:19 PM UTC

schmichael wrote: post #23

cube00 wrote: post #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). […

Microsoft had just acquired SourceSafe in 1995, but it's not clear to me how similar to modern version control systems SourceSafe even was in 1995/6. It may have been more of a distributed lock manager than change management system.

There's a reason why Microsoft didn't use SourceSafe internally, it was an awful version control system even compared to what else was available at the time (CVS and whatnot). For example, it didn't support the concept of "atomic commits". If you tried to commit multiple files at once and one failed to merge, the repo would just update the files that successfully merged and then the developer would have to fix the conflicts and try to commit again. Additionally, if you deleted a file, it would give the option to "permanently delete" it. If you checked this, it would completely remove the file from all past commits. VSS would also randomly corrupt files and the way to fix this was by permanently deleting the file from the repo and then re-adding it. The combination of these factors meant that VSS could not reliably show what the state of the codebase was at a given point in time, which is one of the main reasons for using version control in the first place. I sometimes do software archival work and it's fairly common that you'll find a VSS repo for a project and then you can't compile any commits older than a few weeks because of missing files.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#59

Post by CursedSilicon » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #49

artisinal wrote: post #48

Back when software development was fun. And not the sloppy vibecoded corporate metrics pleaser it has become.

this was released in 1996. Microsoft was at one of its' most powerful evil phases it had ever seen during that phase, and to pretend it was some kind of antithesis to 'corporate metric please' is a disservice to history. I liked comic chat , and I see that your actual point is more just "ai bad" , but 88-99 microsoft was brutally corporate metric pleasing. see also : Microsoft antitrust history Microsoft FTC investig…

Microsoft was a massive corporation

To imply that every single person there was evil to their core simply by association is utterly ridiculous.

I doubt the guy who created Minesweeper was dreaming of world domination while working there

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#60

Post by chromakode » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #47

JeremyHerrman wrote: post #42

Comic Chat has a special place in my heart because it inspired my first startup back in 2008, a comic creation web app called Chogger. The site grew to 30K monthly users, mostly K-12 educators who wanted to give their students a fun way to write stories. The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon…

Ack! It looks so… actionscript. Why does a UI look actionscript? I can’t even begin to imagine why it feels like that.

For me it's the gradients and dark gray backgrounds.