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Hi, 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 ca

Hi, 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 3mo ago
Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it
- outintospace 3mo ago
  I 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 3mo ago
    I 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 Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless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an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.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!
    - 9dev 3mo ago
      …and it's also entirely in character of you representing Microsoft to not reply to my comment :-)
      - DonHopkins 3mo ago
        …and it's also entirely in character of you representing yourself to reply to your own comment :-)
- amiga386 3mo ago
  T DEUCE ME TOO HUGALUGAHGLGHLAHALHGGGGG https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/ https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/
  - joshu 3mo ago
    HLAGHAGHLAGHLAGH
- astrange 3mo ago
  On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it.
  - compass_copium 3mo ago
    You should (I assume it's Rands), he clearly does not want to be rembered as a Jerkcity guy now that he's a Serious Palantir Poobah.
    - mbac32768 3mo ago
      I wonder if bong hits ever helped him with his Makefile.
    - dathanb82 3mo ago
      I mean, he left Palantir over a decade ago and now he’s supposedly retired (again) - I bet he’s pretty chill about it these days.
  - fortran77 3mo ago
    I once worked with nearly all of those guys! A very interesting bunch....
- runjake 3mo ago
  Jerk City lives on, and is now known as Bonequest. Here's today's comic: https://www.bonequest.com/ https://www.bonequest.com/
  - MBCook 3mo ago
    Wow just about to hit 10k comics too. No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them.
  - denkmoon 3mo ago
    Man those are absolutely deranged. Awesome.
- braedon-dev 3mo ago
  [dead]
- droidrungrowth 3mo ago
  [dead]
lysace 3mo ago
Open sourcing code is always welcome. However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc.
- MBCook 3mo ago
  Why is it every time some company people hate does anything good, no matter how trivial, people have to trash it? Someone at MS made a fun IRC client. Thats it. It’s a WILDLY different world than 30 years ago and MS is a different company. They released old code for those interested. Celebrate it.
  - lysace 3mo ago
    First of all: I wrote that I welcome the open sourcing of this code. It was literally the first sentence. I wrote it specifically for reactions like that. They embraced the Internet; in this case IRC. This followed Bill Gates' well-publicised memo "The Internet Tidal Wave" a year earlier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet%20tidal%20wave.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet...). It didn't happen because "someone at MS made a fun IRC client". They extended the open IRC protocol with proprietary extensions hidden inside CTCP (Client-to-Client Protocol) messages to support "the fun stuff": https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20ctcp&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20... (you need to be logged in to Microsoft's Github for code search to work nowadays.) The outcome of this effort: Comic Chat was interoperable with regular IRC clients, but when two Comic Chat users connected, they could see richer interactions.
    - krige 3mo ago
      So where's the extinguish? You can't stop proving your point halfway through unless you're implying you did not actually have a point.
      - lysace 3mo ago
compass_copium 3mo ago
Amazing timing, Jerkcity hits 10,000 strips in like two weeks.
tangenter 3mo ago
Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.
- hombre_fatal 3mo ago
  Man I hadn’t even thought of MSN Gaming Zone again until now yet spent who knows how many hours on it.
zuzululu 3mo ago
amazing i'd love to have the hardware to run this
resonanttoe 3mo ago
Really nice work! This is so very very cool. Comic chat was a phenomenal pain in the arse in the 90s for any IRC channel :P But it's still such a great and important piece of IRC history as a whole. It's amazing cool to see it open sourced and preserved this way. It's amazing to see people do a tonne of work to get things like this and 3D Movie Maker - open sourced. I'd never thought I'd see the day!
csans-cstrip 3mo ago
Thanks for this. I love the work that individuals have been putting into open sourcing historical Microsoft products. I notice there are two (identical) copies of the Comic Sans .ttf in the repo; are they also covered by the terms of the MIT license? According to “otfinfo -i”, they’re an older version than the one typically packaged on Linux (https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the%20fonts/final/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the%20fonts...). Do you think you could swing an official release of the latest and/or historical versions of Comic Sans under MIT or another appropriate license like SIL OFL?
timbroddin 2mo ago
Thanks so much for this! This really brought some nostalgic tears in my eyes. I asked Fable to create a Mac port this weekend: - https://github.com/TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos https://github.com/TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos - Write-up: https://broddin.be/bringing-microsoft-comic-chat-to-the-mac-using-fable/ https://broddin.be/bringing-microsoft-comic-chat-to-the-mac-...

NDlurker 3mo ago

Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it

outintospace 3mo ago
I 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 3mo ago
  I 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!
  - 9dev 3mo ago
    …and it's also entirely in character of you representing Microsoft to not reply to my comment :-)
    - DonHopkins 3mo ago
      …and it's also entirely in character of you representing yourself to reply to your own comment :-)
amiga386 3mo ago
T DEUCE ME TOO HUGALUGAHGLGHLAHALHGGGGG https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/ https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/
- joshu 3mo ago
  HLAGHAGHLAGHLAGH
astrange 3mo ago
On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it.
- compass_copium 3mo ago
  You should (I assume it's Rands), he clearly does not want to be rembered as a Jerkcity guy now that he's a Serious Palantir Poobah.
  - mbac32768 3mo ago
    I wonder if bong hits ever helped him with his Makefile.
  - dathanb82 3mo ago
    I mean, he left Palantir over a decade ago and now he’s supposedly retired (again) - I bet he’s pretty chill about it these days.
- fortran77 3mo ago
  I once worked with nearly all of those guys! A very interesting bunch....
runjake 3mo ago
Jerk City lives on, and is now known as Bonequest. Here's today's comic: https://www.bonequest.com/ https://www.bonequest.com/
- MBCook 3mo ago
  Wow just about to hit 10k comics too. No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them.
- denkmoon 3mo ago
  Man those are absolutely deranged. Awesome.
braedon-dev 3mo ago
[dead]
droidrungrowth 3mo ago
[dead]

lysace 3mo ago

Open sourcing code is always welcome. However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc.

MBCook 3mo ago
Why is it every time some company people hate does anything good, no matter how trivial, people have to trash it? Someone at MS made a fun IRC client. Thats it. It’s a WILDLY different world than 30 years ago and MS is a different company. They released old code for those interested. Celebrate it.
- lysace 3mo ago
  First of all: I wrote that I welcome the open sourcing of this code. It was literally the first sentence. I wrote it specifically for reactions like that. They embraced the Internet; in this case IRC. This followed Bill Gates' well-publicised memo "The Internet Tidal Wave" a year earlier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet%20tidal%20wave.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet...). It didn't happen because "someone at MS made a fun IRC client". They extended the open IRC protocol with proprietary extensions hidden inside CTCP (Client-to-Client Protocol) messages to support "the fun stuff": https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20ctcp&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20... (you need to be logged in to Microsoft's Github for code search to work nowadays.) The outcome of this effort: Comic Chat was interoperable with regular IRC clients, but when two Comic Chat users connected, they could see richer interactions.
  - krige 3mo ago
    So where's the extinguish? You can't stop proving your point halfway through unless you're implying you did not actually have a point.
    - lysace 3mo ago

compass_copium 3mo ago

Amazing timing, Jerkcity hits 10,000 strips in like two weeks.

tangenter 3mo ago

Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.

hombre_fatal 3mo ago
Man I hadn’t even thought of MSN Gaming Zone again until now yet spent who knows how many hours on it.

zuzululu 3mo ago

amazing i'd love to have the hardware to run this

resonanttoe 3mo ago

Really nice work! This is so very very cool. Comic chat was a phenomenal pain in the arse in the 90s for any IRC channel :P But it's still such a great and important piece of IRC history as a whole. It's amazing cool to see it open sourced and preserved this way. It's amazing to see people do a tonne of work to get things like this and 3D Movie Maker - open sourced. I'd never thought I'd see the day!

csans-cstrip 3mo ago

Thanks for this. I love the work that individuals have been putting into open sourcing historical Microsoft products. I notice there are two (identical) copies of the Comic Sans .ttf in the repo; are they also covered by the terms of the MIT license? According to “otfinfo -i”, they’re an older version than the one typically packaged on Linux (https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the%20fonts/final/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the%20fonts...). Do you think you could swing an official release of the latest and/or historical versions of Comic Sans under MIT or another appropriate license like SIL OFL?

timbroddin 2mo ago

Thanks so much for this! This really brought some nostalgic tears in my eyes. I asked Fable to create a Mac port this weekend: - https://github.com/TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos https://github.com/TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos - Write-up: https://broddin.be/bringing-microsoft-comic-chat-to-the-mac-using-fable/ https://broddin.be/bringing-microsoft-comic-chat-to-the-mac-...