Comic Chat becomes open source: Microsoft's 30-year-old IRC client that popularized Comic Sans

Microsoft has made Comic Chat open source, the IRC client that transformed text chatting into comic strips in the 90s. The code, released under the MIT license on GitHub, marks exactly thirty years since the software's debut and coincides with the indirect anniversary of one of the most discussed fonts in computer history: Comic Sans.

In Comic Chat, every message was interpreted in real-time and translated into poses, facial expressions, and speech bubbles, with illustrated characters managing gestures and comics based on the content of the sentence. Writing "I like that thing" prompted the character to point at itself, while an aggressive tone translated into crossed arms or angry grimaces.

The project originated in 1995 at Microsoft Research, developed by David "DJ" Kurlander within the Virtual Worlds Group. Written in Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC, Comic Chat debuted in 1996 alongside Internet Explorer 3, later being localized into 24 languages and bundled with Windows 98. The software would later change its name to Microsoft Chat, becoming the default client for the MSN service for a period.

Kurlander, along with Tim Skelly and David Salesin, presented the technology at SIGGRAPH '96, describing it as an experiment in automatic illustration construction and pagination. The graphic style was signed by Jim Woodring, an independent cartoonist to whom the team entrusted the transcriptions of real chat sessions, to see if the idea had visual sense even before writing a line of working code.

The Font Born (Almost) by Chance

The most enduring connection of Comic Chat to pop culture remains with Comic Sans. The font, designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, found its first true practical application in the software: the informal and hand-drawn style matched the aesthetics of the program's comic strips, helping to make it known far beyond the boundaries of Comic Chat itself.

Scott Hanselman, Microsoft vice president now at GitHub, announced the initiative in an official blog post dedicated to the company's open-source efforts. The repository includes the original snapshots of the code from 1996-1998, along with some attempts at modernization with the support of artificial intelligence, to compile that C++ and MFC from thirty years ago using current Visual Studio tools, connect it to modern IRC servers, and make it readable on today's high-resolution screens.

Viewed through today’s lens, Comic Chat remains an almost naive experiment by the standards of modern messaging apps, which are made up of reactions, stickers, and AI-generated content. However, it stands as proof that some of the insights underlying contemporary visual communication were already circulating thirty years ago, at a time when the web had yet to write its own rules.