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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

#91

Post by outintospace »

NDlurker wrote: post #78
outintospace wrote: post #64

Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally. I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release ha…

Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it

I used it to create a presentation for my talk at a conference last year. https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#92

Post by Athas »

Sharlin wrote: post #66
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…

Microsoft SOP, especially back then.

Yes, I really wonder how they expected people would react to that.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#94

Post by johannes1234321 »

ndiddy wrote: post #58
schmichael wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> 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".

Neither did CVS. That was one of the big sellers of Subversion (maybe even the seller)

CVS in essence was just remote access to RCS files, where each file was handled independently, which caused lots of trouble to recover a specific state of work, especially when including deleted (or even worse: replaced) files.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#95

Post by JeremyHerrman »

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.

Haha, yes flex apps definitely had a feel to them!

It's easy to criticize but remember, this was back in the days of supporting IE6 and XHR was still relatively new!

Flex's standard UI library was filled with bluish-gray gradients and verdana :)

Here's an article which has a screenshot with a bunch of controls: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-application...

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#96

Post by smokel »

There's an interesting easter egg in semantic.cpp, line 77:

  if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) {
Apparently, if your text contains the word "OXio", it triggers the following riddle: What's round on the ends and hi in the middle?

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#97

Post by pishpash »

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.

That's what it was, wasn't it? You checked out some files and that locked them against other changes, then when you were done you checked in.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#98

Post by efdee »

Athas wrote: post #92
Sharlin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft SOP, especially back then.

Yes, I really wonder how they expected people would react to that.

Comic Chat had its own IRC servers ran by Microsoft. You weren't supposed to use it on "regular" servers.

Re: Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

#100

Post by rincebrain »

Athas wrote: post #92
Sharlin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft SOP, especially back then.

Yes, I really wonder how they expected people would react to that.

I have to imagine the answer was either "dedicated MSCC servers and EEE" depending on your level of cynicism or "it was just a tech demo that escaped".
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