4 ms·
Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
- clear-octopus 4mo ago[dead]
- jervant 4mo agoDirect link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
- HeliumHydride 4mo agohttps://bonequest.com/ https://bonequest.com/
- vsri 4mo agoHAGHLUABLABG I can't believe this is still going
- froh 4mo ago> HAGHLUABLABG ??
- amiga386 4mo agohttps://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/page/119/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/page/119/mo... > HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL, interj. An all-purpose sound, denoting the act of performing oral sex, the act of receiving oral sex, taking drugs, writing your Congressman, misdialing your party and getting that annoying series of tones, or sitting perfectly still and making no noise whatsoever.
- duskwuff 4mo agoI believe this is what the tags call "cocksucking-noises". https://www.bonequest.com/tags/cocksucking-noises https://www.bonequest.com/tags/cocksucking-noises (To solve the CAPTCHA: "spigot" is the human face.)
- miah_ 4mo agoAhhh jerkcity. A classic.
- huflungdung 4mo agoBlocked in UK
- clear-octopus 4mo ago[dead]
- razakel 4mo agoOnly if you're on O2 or 3 and haven't disabled the adult content filter.
- dole 4mo agoRands is a programmer/PM IRL: https://randsinrepose.com/ https://randsinrepose.com/
- jdw64 4mo agoI still think this project has potential.
- antics9 4mo agoThat’s hilarious. I hope to see some fun spinoffs. Ran comic chat on a freshly installed Win98 (or 95, don’t remember) Pentium II.
- MBCook 4mo agoI think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.
- superkuh 4mo agoMicrosoft Comic Chat was my first introduction to IRC. I was just a kid poking around in system32 directory and found mschat.exe. It opened a whole new world. I still participate in IRC communities to this day. I regularly reference it. So it's a shame that microsoft is blocking non-corporate browsers from accessing this news release, "The request is blocked. 20260716T162640Z-r17d8486fc4rbjkdhC1CHI16pc00000008m000000000a54t" I imagine most people who care about MS Comic Chat aren't using Chrome or Edge. A better URL since MS is blocking might be https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS or just the github repo that's in another comment.
- kylemaxwell 4mo agoURL works fine for me using Safari on a non-corporate Mac. You may have jumped to conclusions a little precipitously.
- superkuh 4mo agoEh? I think you've misunderstood. I said corporate browsers do work. Safari is very much a corporate browser developed and owned exclusively by Apple corporation. But yeah, until it happens to themselves people generally don't believe anyone else's lived experience and react very negatively to it.
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoThe creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.
- ahartmetz 4mo agoAs "Principal Program Manager, Copilot Acceleration Team" even. That's sad. It sounds like person in charge of "Hey do you want Copilot? How about now? How about now? And now?! Here's another popup! Do you want it now? Why not?! Have you tried Copilot?" Etc... (I know about title inflation, he's probably not in charge of all that much, but still)
- dmd 4mo agoCopilot means so many things now it doesn't even tell you anything about they do.
- inigyou 4mo agoIt was explained to me that the word "Copilot" is just Microsoft's brand for what the rest of us call "AI" - just like "365" means "online", "Azure" means "cloud", "Entra" means "login" and ".NET" used to mean "with a computer". So when you see something like "Azure Copilot 365" you can pretend they wrote, fully generically, "Online Cloud AI". If you see a button labelled "Copilot" you understand it would've said "AI" if they were any other company.
- mossTechnician 4mo agoMicrosoft also apparently "rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022"[0], causing a lot of confusion about what "Microsoft 365 Copilot" on their homepage meant, but I think it would translate to "Cloud Office Suite + Cloud AI" [0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-rebrand-copilot https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
- inigyou 4mo ago
- mettamage 4mo agoThis is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)
- thebeardisred 4mo agoYes… Ha ha ha… YES!
- animanoir 4mo ago[dead]
- unfunco 4mo agoOnly tangentially related, but I'm convinced Comic Sans is the best font option available in Slack, and everyone should try it.
- ritonlajoie 4mo agoThis was my first introduction to internet
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dmd 4mo agoMy fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
- cube00 4mo agov1.0-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). [2] [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%20and%20v1.0%20share%20the%20same%20internal%20version%20number%20(rup%20206%2C%20%22Beta%202%22)%20but%20differ%20in%20~99%20of%20111%20shared%20source%20files https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%2... [2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=111733#:~:text=internal%20source%20code%20system https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...
- schmichael 4mo agoMicrosoft 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.
- cube00 4mo agoSLM was at version 1.5 by 1988 and looking at chapter 5 suggests it had strong version number and external release management [1] [1]: https://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SLM-1.5-Guides.pdf https://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SLM-1.5-Guides.p...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- EvanAnderson 4mo agoMicrosoft made a product based on SLM called Delta[0]. I'd never heard of it until that Youtube video came up. SLM's "architecture" reminds me a lot of Microsoft Mail postoffices-- a file share that every user interacts with and no actual server-side code (i.e. just using file sharing semantics for clients to interact). (Lots of apps, not just MSFT, did that back in the 90s and it was _hell_.) Based on what I've read about source control at Microsoft I'd guess Comic Chat straddled the use of both SLM and Source Depot (post W2K, from what I've seen). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM
- Athas 4mo agoComic 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, rather than relying entirely on contextual cues. This was essentially done by adding some nonsense string to every message, which presumably could be decoded by other Comic Chat users, but read like spammy noise to everyone else. I know it did that, because I remember downloading Comic Chat to check it out, but I forget whether it was the default or not.
- ok123456 4mo agohttps://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260 Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
- cool_dude85 4mo ago\me plays ahhhBeer.wav
- Onavo 4mo ago>Alongside the original snapshots, we’ve included a few AI-powered modernization attempts that demonstrate what’s possible—getting this 1990s-era C++ and MFC code building with current Visual Studio tools, connecting to modern IRC servers, and running legibly on today’s high-resolution Windows machines. Given that MSFT is all in on Rust and WinUI now, maybe they can try doing a full port similar to Bun using Copilot. Anthropic has been milking their Bun port attempt for as much as they can.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- buildsjets 4mo agoSomeone wants to taste the curb! https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- stormed 4mo agoJerk City sends its regards
- zetanor 4mo agoExtend, embrace
- lysace 4mo agoEmbrace, extend, and extinguish
- JeremyHerrman 4mo agoComic 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 tail dragging behavior just right... one of the teachers made a video overview of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw
- Aeolun 4mo agoAck! It looks so… actionscript. Why does a UI look actionscript? I can’t even begin to imagine why it feels like that.
- chromakode 4mo agoFor me it's the gradients and dark gray backgrounds.
- whalesalad 4mo agoThe verdana font and virtually every element is misaligned in some way
- JeremyHerrman 4mo agoHaha, 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-applications/ https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-application...
- vollmond 4mo agoAw, I miss Flex. It made so much sense to me.
- AshamedCaptain 4mo agoI remember implementing the paper at some point, and though it was fun enough that it would make for a slightly less boring programming project for students.
- clear-octopus 4mo ago[dead]
- artisinal 4mo agoBack when software development was fun. And not the sloppy vibecoded corporate metrics pleaser it has become.
- serf 4mo agothis was released in 1996. Microsoft was at one of its' most powerful evil phases it had ever seen during that phase, and to pretend it was some kind of antithesis to 'corporate metric please' is a disservice to history. I liked comic chat , and I see that your actual point is more just "ai bad" , but 88-99 microsoft was brutally corporate metric pleasing. see also : Microsoft antitrust history Microsoft FTC investigation 1990 Microsoft DOJ antitrust 1993 Microsoft 1994 consent decree Microsoft anticompetitive licensing Microsoft per-processor licensing Microsoft consent decree Judge Stanley Sporkin Microsoft vaporware antitrust Microsoft market foreclosure 1990s Gary Kildall Microsoft controversy Stac Electronics / DoubleSpace Microsoft Stac Electronics lawsuit Microsoft DoubleSpace patent infringement Microsoft Intuit acquisition antitrust feels like selling an old bicycle on craigslist with the amount of things you can tag M$ with.
- hedora 4mo agoThis came out of Microsoft Research, which was a bit of a safe haven from such stuff back then. MSN Chat was the full corporate bundled with windows program that matches your description of ‘90s Microsoft. A non-monetized chat app targeting decentralized protocols definitely was not.
- Sharlin 4mo agoStill, they managed to Embrace&Extend the IRC protocol in a way that was annoying to anyone not using Comic Chat.
- CursedSilicon 4mo agoMicrosoft was a massive corporation To imply that every single person there was evil to their core simply by association is utterly ridiculous. I doubt the guy who created Minesweeper was dreaming of world domination while working there
- guessbest 4mo agoThirty years old. Hard to believe
- klondike_klive 4mo agoOne of my first ever gigs was writing comedy sketches for a BBC digital channel using MS Comic Chat, which they filmed as if it were a super low frame rate cartoon. The most incredibly cheap TV. I think we (my writing/performing partners and I) generated a few hours of usable footage for them and got paid about 50 quid each.
- Kuyawa 4mo agoI loved Comic Chat, countless good memories when dial up was still a thing. I'll fork it and have fun with it again, with the help of AI of course ;-)
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago...for years I've talked about this program here on HN! This is exciting for me, I will definitely be downloading and perusing the code when I get back home from vacation. Thank you to the original developers, and to the current team at Microsoft that made this release possible! I have a vivid memory of my sister and my mom in Puerto Rico, on our packardbell computer, hearing it making dial-up noises for days or hours, until they finally got online. I also remember seeing my sister using that program in the 90s, I must have been 5 to 7 years old, she was a teenager. Fun fact, it's an IRC client that injects its own schema and then other Comic Chat IRC compatible clients interpret it and display it. You can go on freenet (DONT GO INTO POPULATED CHANNELS!) and go into like #hn-comic-chat or something and others who join will see what you see! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=giancarlostoro%20comic%20chat&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- anthk 4mo agoLibera.chat instead of freenode. Also, Bitlbee.org's public servers against your own Jabber and Mastodon accounts and the like.
- rideontime 4mo agoDepressing to see all the AI-generated text in an article about a creative communication tool. Even the comic's punchline is clunky, and no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy."
- outintospace 4mo agoI wrote that, not AI. There's a typo: it was supposed to be, "Is the Space Jam guy still playing baseball?" I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
- cube00 4mo ago> I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date. It's depressing that even a blog post about open sourcing a two decade old piece of software has such a hard deadline the author feels pressured to publish before they're ready.
- outintospace 4mo agoSorry to bring you down. I hope you can find joy in the rest of the work.
- mrob 4mo ago>no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy." Maybe not in the USA, but globally I think it's likely that more people watched Space Jam than ever watched an NBA match. Professional basketball is a niche sport in most of the world.
- anthk 4mo agoWell, everyone knows about MJ in Europe even if they never saw a basketball match ever (outside school OFC) because of his sneakers.
- outintospace 4mo agoHi, 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 happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.
- NDlurker 4mo agoThank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it
- outintospace 4mo agoI used it to create a presentation for my talk at a conference last year. https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html
- 9dev 4mo agoI take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere. What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?"). I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress!
- dartharva 4mo agoOpen source Windows NT instead
- outintospace 4mo agowhynotboth.gif
- tsumnia 4mo agoThanks for the artifact :D I look forward to seeing someone use this as a pipeline for AI video creation (and I don't see that as a bad thing fyi)
- EliRivers 4mo agoA google search for the creator of the Comic Sans font, Vincent Connare, triggers a fun google Easter egg.
- kridsdale1 4mo agoMade me laugh.
- dev_l1x_be 4mo agoRust/Go rewrite when?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- treve 4mo agoI was around 16 when I discovered this, and it was my first IRC client. Didn't fully get what IRC was yet. It felt like a new world opening up.
- elsig60 4mo agoNice. finally I will be abale to communicate with the new hires! LOL
- _0xdd 4mo agoThis is very cool. Do V-Chat next!
- koenada 4mo agoI was just thinking the same thing. I spent so much time with Comic Chat and V-Chat. V-Chat was mind blowing as a kid.
- crooked-v 4mo agoSo the real question is, when will somebody turn this into a Discord client?
- samso26 4mo ago[flagged]
- smokel 4mo agoThere'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?
- outintospace 4mo agoAwesome find. :)
- wlonkly 4mo agoGuessing the X was to disable it without disabling it.
- moontear 4mo agoBack when eastereggs were semi-allowed in MS software. Shame it is being discouraged or disallowed. Totally understand it from a security and maintenance perspective, but things were more fun back then.
- orsenthil 4mo agoRelated. You can make XKCD style comics easily with this web-app and library called cmx.js https://orsenthil.github.io/cmx.js/ https://orsenthil.github.io/cmx.js/ https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2026/06/17/xkcd-diagram-creator-with-cmxjs.html https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2026/06/17/xkcd-dia...
- anthk 4mo agoMerge this with the public servers of https://bitlbee.org https://bitlbee.org to use Jabber or Mastodon servers (among others) with it.
- markun 4mo agoWhen somebody inevitably LLM this to rust/zig/bling/zork/vupt; please drop a link!
- userbinator 4mo ago...and we shall then see just how incredibly bloated software has become.
- DonHopkins 4mo agoI'm afraid Zig passed its shelf life and self immolated. Zig's creator can't stop himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAjNWanR3n8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAjNWanR3n8
- anvuong 4mo agoew Theo's words mean absolute jack** though, he's just a grade A a*hole attention grabbers.
- DonHopkins 4mo agoAnd that makes him wrong how? Are you still using Zig?
- flumpcakes 4mo agoThat video is embarrassing. Theo clearly doesn't know what he is talking about at points, and is having a massive crash out for really no reason.
- seba_dos1 4mo agoPublishing various versions of the code in a version control system repository as separate directories living on the same branch is an interesting choice.
- kylemaxwell 4mo agoOh man, I remember this from when I was in college. I didn't really realize it was IRC, and so I thought everybody else in the chat rooms was using it and saw the visualizations. 30 years later and I still cringe at the memories. (The problem was not the client, it was me, heh.)
- luciana1u 4mo ago[flagged]
- afavour 4mo ago> The early web was filled with experimentation. “What if chat rooms looked like comics?” That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98. This really resonated with me. Too much development work today feels like colouring in predefined boxes. Love to see some software that thought way out of the box and got institutional support.
- duxup 4mo agoWeird stuff and “what if we just tried it?”
- MBCook 4mo agoNo kidding. “After we get through round 3 what’s our exit strategy?” “Exit strategy? It’s a tiki head on IRC. No one is paying us anything. Just enjoy it.”
- guestbest 4mo agoModems were slow and a monthly cost that tied up people’s phone lines. This was another way to get people online. It wasn’t a given thing that we think of nowadays.
- stevage 4mo agoI'm fascinated that I have never heard of this, even though I did use IRC during that early 2000s era.
- MBCook 4mo agoIn my mind it had mostly come and gone by then. I don’t think it was ever very popular. But I remember it fondly.
- King-Aaron 4mo agoNeed a Teams integration, stat
- duxup 4mo agoI remember Comic Chat I still bring that up when I get to discussing the weird days of the Internet when it felt like people were just trying all kinds of things left and right.
- awsanswers 4mo agoI was fascinated by this as a young teenager. I still love it
- IronWolve 4mo agoNice, I just made an IRC app that loads comic chat files a few weeks ago. I added some updates, ignore bots, new expressions, diff message bubble behavior, more panels, custom avatars, colors, etc. https://github.com/IronWolve/MaxChat https://github.com/IronWolve/MaxChat
- lukasb 4mo agoImpressed that they actually hired Jim Woodring to help with the original.
- iboisvert 4mo agoThis is awesome. Is there some way we could replace the MS Teams meeting Facilitator with this?
- fortran77 4mo agoThe folks at Jerk City will be very happy. https://www.jerkcity.com/9981 https://www.jerkcity.com/9981
- jebasonz 4mo agoIt's New to me. I love comics. Hypothetically speaking if I drew my comic will I be able to post it in here.
- rob74 4mo agoMicrosoft Comic Chat - the only place where using Comic Sans is appropriate
- DonHopkins 4mo agoI'm Comic Sans, asshole! https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole >Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg. One other place: We shipped The Sims 1 using Comic Sans, and it did ok. The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1: https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the-sims-1-3e76f394452c https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the... The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-1-crowd-sitter-1f478b645148 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-1-crowd-sitter-1f478b...
- rob74 4mo ago> I'm Comic Sans, asshole! https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole That text would have sounded a whole lot more convincing if it had actually used Comic Sans... EDIT: turns out it actually does, or it tries to. The paragraphs have "font-family:'Comic Sans', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Marker Felt';". But, as a Comic Sans hating Linux user, I of course don't have the first two installed, and no idea what this Marker Felt he is speaking of is! He could have used a Comic Sans lookalike webfont, or at least added a generic "sans-serif" fallback, but since he didn't, the browser falls back to a serif font.
- DonHopkins 4mo agoObviously he was just passive-aggressively trolling GNU/Linux users, because he mistakenly thought that 2010 was finally The Year of the Linux Desktop. At least he got you to go "View Source". If you use eww to browse the web like rms, you can put this in your .emacs file: (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Comic Sans MS" :height 420)
- chickensong 4mo agoHURF DURF
- 4ggr0 4mo agoi use Comic Mono in my terminal :) (comic chat probably isn't monospace) https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/
- PunchyHamster 4mo agoStill better chat experience than MS Teams
- melicerte 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- barrystaes 4mo agoThis is not a font (like Comic Sans) but was an actual application (to make comics from IRC chats) that was shipped with Windows 98. The application got open sourced.. https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat
- opengrass 4mo agoBack when people had a sense of humour and just wanted to sully your chat log.
- psawaya 4mo agoGreat idea. Got it running on the web. Come hang :) https://chat.elsewhere.zone/ https://chat.elsewhere.zone/
- aedis 4mo agoWaste of time like upgrading Notepad but but we don't have calendar on dual-screen monitor since win11 came out.
- maybeben 4mo agoI still want the XiRCON source