Microsoft open-sources Comic Chat after 30 years

Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, the unusual 1996 chat client that turned IRC conversations into comic panels with illustrated characters, speech bubbles, and expressions. The release puts a quirky but influential piece of internet history on GitHub, including the software many people first associate with Comic Sans.

Originally designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, Comic Sans found one of its earliest defining uses inside Comic Chat, where its hand-drawn look matched the app’s comic-book interface. Microsoft frames the project as both a nostalgia artifact from the early internet and a chance for developers, historians, and retro computing fans to inspect the code directly.

Rather than showing chat as scrolling text, Comic Chat rendered participants as illustrated characters and tried to infer tone from what users typed. A line like “I like that” might trigger a self-pointing gesture; angrier text could produce a frown or crossed arms. Microsoft says the software made real-time decisions about poses, facial expressions, gestures, and panel layouts instead of simply displaying messages.

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How Comic Chat was built

David “DJ” Kurlander, working in the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group, came up with the idea and began development in 1995. Built with Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC, Comic Chat shipped in 1996 alongside Internet Explorer 3. Kurlander, Tim Skelly, and David Salesin also presented the underlying technology at SIGGRAPH '96, describing it as an experiment in automatic illustration construction and layout.

The software’s visual style came from independent comic artist Jim Woodring. Microsoft says the team tested the concept by giving Woodring transcripts of real chat sessions to illustrate by hand before deciding the idea was worth pursuing.

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What’s in the open-source release

Microsoft says the release is meant to preserve an important chapter in online communication and give the community something to study and build on. Alongside original snapshots, the company has also included a few AI-powered modernization attempts showing how the old C++ and MFC code can be built with current Visual Studio tools, connect to modern IRC servers, and run more cleanly on today’s high-resolution Windows PCs.

Those updates are not being presented as polished re-releases, Microsoft says, but as working examples. Comic Chat was later localized into 24 languages and bundled with Windows 98 — a reminder of how far Microsoft once took an idea that sounded, even then, a little unreasonable.