On July 16, 2026, Microsoft released thecally renders entered conversations as comic strip panels. In addition to the code from before the official release in 1996 to the beta version in 1998, examples of modifications to make it work on current Windows environments are also available on GitHub.
Microsoft Comic Chat is now open
microsoft/comic-chat:om/microsoft/comic-chat
Microsoft Comic Chat, an IRC client from 30 years ago that helped popularize Comic Sans, is going openndows-11/microsoft-comic-chat-an-irc-client-from-30-years-ago-that-helped-popularize-comic-sans-is-going-open-source
Microsoft Comic Chat was developed in 1995 by David Kallander, who was part of Microsoft Research’s Virtual Worlds Group. Developed using Visual C++ 4.0 and the Microsoft Foundation Class Library, it was initially released as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996, and later included in Windows 98 and MSN. It is software for connecting to the internet chat system ‘IRC’.
In IRC, participants’ messages are usually displayed as text in chronological order, but Comic Chat replaces the conversation participants with manga characters and displays their comments as panels with speech bubbles.
In Comic Chat, when a user sends a message, the built-in expert system analyzes the content and flow of the conversation. Based on this analysis, the system determines in real time which characters appear on the screen, their expressions and gestures, their positions, the shape of the speech bubbles, the composition of the panels, and the zoom level. You can see it in action in the video below.
Microsoft Comic Chat. David Kurlander. Microsoft Research. January 1996. – YouTube
Comic Chat connects to a standard IRC server, so you can chat with people using regular text-based IRC clients. Even if the other person isn’t using Comic Chat, they will be automatically assigned a character, and the entire conversation will be displayed as a comic on the Comic Chat side.
The character designs were created by independent cartoonist Jim Woodling. The development team provided Woodling with actual chat logs to illustrate, and then used those results as a reference to build a system that automatically converts conversations into comics.
Furthermore, Comic Chat is also known as one of the factors that helped make the typeface ‘Comic Sans’ widely known.
Comic Sans is a typeface designed in 1994 by Microsoft typographer Vincent Conare, and was adopted because its handwritten-style form was suitable for speech bubbles in Comic Chat. Microsoft explains that Comic Chat was the first major place where Comic Sans was actually used.
The designer who created the font ‘Comic Sans,’ which was so unpopular that a movement to ban its use arose – GIGAZINE
The repository released this time includes the source code for the pre-release version from August 1996, version 1.0, version 2.1 beta and version 2.5 beta 1 from 1998. It also includes the SDK, related tools, the Java client ‘JChat’, sample bots, and internal design documentation, and is licensed under the MIT License.
Furthermore, an example of a modified version that can be built with the current Visual Studio is also provided. This includes features such as display adjustments for high-DPI displays, mouse wheel scrolling, text wrapping within speech bubbles, and TLS support for connecting to the current IRC server, demonstrating that Comic Chat can run even in modern Windows environments.
However, Microsoft stated that the GitHub repository is a read-only archive released as historical documentation and is not a project that Microsoft will continuously maintain. They described the open-sourcing as ‘an effort to preserve important software in the evolution of online communication and to make it available to developers, researchers, and retrocomputing enthusiasts to explore the code and use for new improvements, ports, and experiments.’
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in Video, Software, Posted by log1i_yk
