Microsoft Comic Chat Goes Open Source: The App That Popularized Comic Sans
Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
We are thrilled to open source Microsoft Comic Chat, the legendary 1990s application that transformed IRC text into comic panels and introduced the world to Comic Sans. Originally built by Microsoft Research and illustrated by Jim Woodring, this nostalgic artifact is now available on GitHub for developers and historians to explore, modernize, and celebrate as a unique chapter in internet history.
Innovation often starts with ideas that are playful, unconventional, and creative.
- outintospace
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.
- JeremyHerrman
Comic 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
- Athas
Comic 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.
- afavour
> 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.
- ok123456
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
- HeliumHydride
- smokel
There'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?
- buildsjets
Someone wants to taste the curb!