⏱️ Lectura: 9 min
Microsoft has just published the complete source code of Comic Chat on GitHub, the client that back in 1996 turned IRC conversations into comic panels, with characters that gestured based on what you typed. Along the way, that app was the birthplace of a typeface that still fuels memes and design debates today: Comic Sans.
📑 En este artículo
The announcement came on July 16, 2026, on the Microsoft Open Source blog, signed by Robert Standefer and Scott Hanselman. This is more than a nostalgic gesture: the code lets you study how a thirty-year-old program made automatic editorial decisions about a real-time conversation, something we now associate almost exclusively with generative artificial intelligence.
TL;DR
- Microsoft released the Comic Chat source code on July 16, 2026 on GitHub.
- Comic Chat turned IRC conversations into comic panels with animated characters.
- David Kurlander created Comic Chat in 1995 at Microsoft Research, and it shipped in 1996 alongside Internet Explorer 3.
- Comic Chat popularized the Comic Sans typeface, designed by Vincent Connare in 1994.
- Illustrator Jim Woodring designed the characters the app used.
- The team published the technology’s paper at SIGGRAPH ’96 as an experiment in automatic illustration.
- Comic Chat was translated into 24 languages and came bundled with Windows 98.
- Microsoft also uploaded AI-assisted modernization attempts to compile the code in current Visual Studio.
What happened with Comic Chat
The code Microsoft uploaded to GitHub is Comic Chat, an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client that, instead of showing the conversation as plain text, drew it as a comic strip. Each message became a speech bubble inside a panel, with a character that struck a pose and an expression matching what you typed.
The release includes the original 1996 snapshot exactly as it was distributed, plus a series of AI-assisted modernization attempts. According to the blog itself, these attempts got the nineties-era C++ and MFC code to compile with current Visual Studio tools, connect to modern IRC servers, and look legible on high-resolution screens. Microsoft clarifies that these are not polished re-releases but worked examples meant for the community to experiment with.
Context and history: from Microsoft Research to Windows 98
Comic Chat was born in 1995 inside the Virtual Worlds Group at Microsoft Research. David “DJ” Kurlander was the one who proposed representing a conversation’s history as a comic strip rather than a list of messages. The team built the application in Visual C++ 4.0 using MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), and shipped it in 1996 alongside the Internet Explorer 3 browser.
Kurlander, together with Tim Skelly and David Salesin, documented the technology in a paper presented at SIGGRAPH ’96, the most important computer graphics conference in the field. There they described the system as an experiment in automatic illustration construction and design: Comic Chat didn’t just show messages, it made real-time decisions about how each panel should look.
The visual side was handled by Jim Woodring, a renowned independent cartoonist. The team handed him real transcripts of chat sessions to illustrate, and used those results to decide whether the overall idea worked. It worked well enough that Comic Chat was translated into 24 languages and distributed with Windows 98.
One detail that connects directly to the present: Comic Sans, designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, found its first real home in Comic Chat. The font’s informal, handwritten style fit the program’s speech bubbles far better than any other use it had been given until then.
How Comic Chat worked under the hood
The interesting technical part of Comic Chat wasn’t the drawing itself, but the process that decided what to draw. The program analyzed conversational cues in the text (if someone typed “I like that,” the character might point at itself; if the tone suggested anger, the character frowned or crossed its arms) and from that it chose the pose, facial expression, and finally how to lay out the comic panels.
That pipeline, from raw text to a composed panel, can be summed up in discrete steps:
flowchart TD
A["Text message in IRC"] --> B["Conversational cue analyzer"]
B --> C["Pose and expression selection"]
C --> D["Panel layout choice"]
D --> E["Rendered comic panel"]
It’s a system based on hand-written rules and heuristics, not a neural network. The comparison with today’s avatar generators or AI video assistants is inevitable, but the central difference is exactly that: Comic Chat made editorial decisions with explicitly programmed deterministic logic, three decades before a trained model could do something similar from data.
📌 Note: it’s a curious irony that the Comic Sans typeface, now synonymous with bad typographic taste in memes, was born designed specifically to fit the hand-drawn speech bubbles of Comic Chat.
Microsoft published two variants of the code for anyone who wants to explore it:
| Published version | What it includes | What it’s for | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original snapshot (1996) | Code in Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC exactly as it was compiled for Internet Explorer 3 | Studying the original implementation and the design of the era | Doesn’t compile directly with modern Visual Studio without adjustments |
| AI-assisted modernization | Adjustments to compile in current Visual Studio, connect to modern IRC servers, and look good on high-resolution screens | Running Comic Chat on a current Windows without emulating the whole system | It’s an experimental example, not a polished version officially maintained by Microsoft |
How to try Comic Chat today
The repository lives in Microsoft’s GitHub organization. The first step is to clone it, which is identical on Windows, macOS, or Linux:
# Windows, macOS, or Linux: clone the repository published by Microsoft
# check github.com/microsoft to confirm the exact repo name
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/<repo-name>.git
cd <repo-name>
Compiling the original snapshot or the modernized variant requires Windows with Visual Studio and the desktop development with C++ component:
:: Windows with Visual Studio 2022 (Desktop development with C++)
msbuild ComicChat.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=Win32
For those on macOS or Linux, the realistic alternative is to run it inside a Windows virtual machine, or experiment with Wine unofficially:
# Linux or macOS via Wine (not officially supported by Microsoft)
wine cmd /c "msbuild ComicChat.sln /p:Configuration=Release"
To confirm you’re standing on the correct release commit, you can check the date of the repo’s first commit: git log --reverse --format="%ad %s" | head -1 should show you the message associated with the code opening on July 16, 2026.
⚠️ Heads up: this is nineties-era C++ code that parses network text without the validations you’d expect today. Don’t expose it directly to public IRC servers without running it in a virtual machine or an isolated environment.
Impact and what this release means
Comic Chat joins a Microsoft trend of open-sourcing historic software to preserve it and let the community study it. For developers and retrocomputing enthusiasts, having access to the actual code behind a 1996 SIGGRAPH experiment is different from reading about it in a paper or looking at screenshots: it lets you see exactly how it was solved, with what data structures and what trade-offs of the era.
There’s also a reading about the present. Today we take for granted that a chat has reactions, stickers, GIFs, avatars, or AI-generated content. In the mid-nineties, internet chat was basically text scrolling across the screen. Comic Chat tried something different with the tools available at the time, and much of that ambition (visually representing the tone and emotion of a conversation) is still alive in today’s messaging apps.
What’s next for Comic Chat
Microsoft explicitly says it hopes to see what the community does with the code: improvements, ports, experiments, entirely new forms derived from the original project. The modernization attempts they published are not meant to be the final version, but examples that Comic Chat can run again on current systems.
The reasonable thing to expect in the short term is that forks will appear that try to port the panel-generation logic to a more modern rendering engine, or that better document Jim Woodring’s original graphic asset format. None of that is confirmed yet: it depends on how active the retrocomputing community becomes around the freshly published repository.
📖 Summary on Telegram: View summary
Try it yourself: clone the Comic Chat repository at github.com/microsoft and compile the original snapshot with Visual Studio to watch your first panel render from a real IRC conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly did Comic Chat do?
It was an IRC client that, instead of showing messages as plain text, turned them into comic panels: each participant appeared as an illustrated character with a pose, expression, and speech bubble generated based on what they typed.
Why is Comic Chat related to the Comic Sans typeface?
Comic Sans was designed by Vincent Connare in 1994 and found its first real use in Comic Chat: its informal, handmade style fit the program’s speech bubbles better than any other application of the era.
Can I compile and run Comic Chat on Windows 11 today?
Beyond the original snapshot, Microsoft published AI-assisted modernization attempts designed to compile in current Visual Studio and connect to modern IRC servers. They are experimental examples, not official versions maintained by Microsoft.
Who illustrated the Comic Chat characters?
Independent cartoonist Jim Woodring, who worked from real chat session transcripts to define the visual style of the characters.
Under what license was the code released?
The official announcement confirms that the code is now open source on GitHub; for the exact license text, you need to check the corresponding file inside the repository Microsoft published.
Is the Comic Chat code good for anything beyond nostalgia?
Yes: it lets you study firsthand how a nineties system solved, with hand-written rules, a problem that today is tackled with generative models: interpreting the tone of a text and translating it into a coherent visual representation.
References
- Microsoft Open Source Blog: the official announcement of the Comic Chat code opening.
- GitHub: microsoft: the organization where Microsoft publishes its open source repositories, including Comic Chat.
- Wikipedia: Comic Chat: history and technical context of the IRC client.
- Wikipedia: Comic Sans: origin of the typeface designed by Vincent Connare in 1994.
📱 Enjoy this content? Follow @programacion on Telegram for daily tech content in Spanish: quick summaries, fresh content every day. @programacion
Imagen destacada: Foto de Dominik Puskas en Unsplash
0 Comments