Microsoft Open-Sources Comic Chat, the IRC Client That Turned Your Conversations Into a Comic

If you’re over thirty and spent some time on IRC in the late ’90s, Comic Chat will definitely ring a bell. Microsoft has just open-sourced its complete source code on GitHub under the MIT license, and it did so with a meticulously curated repository: snapshots ranging from the 1996 beta all the way to 2.5, release notes, internal documentation, and even a couple of modernized builds that compile in Visual Studio 2022.

For those who didn’t experience it: Comic Chat was an IRC client that Microsoft bundled with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996, and which later shipped with Windows 98 and MSN. Instead of showing the conversation as plain text, an expert system decided in real time which character represented each user, which gesture and facial expression matched whatever you’d just typed, how the speech bubbles were arranged, and when it was time to move to the next panel. In other words: you chatted, and without drawing a single line, your conversation turned itself into a comic strip. For a huge number of people who had no idea what an IRC server even was, it was the gateway into talking to strangers over the internet.

The project was kicked off by DJ Kurlander at Microsoft Research. Version 1.0 shipped in June 1996 with IE3 (it could run as a standalone app or embedded as an OLE server inside the browser), and 2.0 arrived with IE4 and Windows 98, adding multi-server support, OLE scripting, and an SDK so people could build their own bots. By the early 2000s, instant messaging had swallowed up graphical IRC clients whole, and Comic Chat was discontinued.

Now, nearly thirty years later, Microsoft has decided to open the whole chest: the repository includes the “Beta 2” pre-release from August 1996, the final 1.0, the 2.1 beta from February 1998, the 2.5.1 beta from June of that same year, and even a bundle of artifacts with the SDK, the JChat Java client, the sample bot Betty Bot, and internal design documentation. All of it with the files’ original timestamps preserved in a dates.txt, for anyone who enjoys some proper archaeology.

The most interesting part, for anyone who wants more than a nostalgic look at the code, are the two *-modern folders: a modernization effort for v1.0-pre and v2.5-beta-1 that gets them compiling in Visual Studio 2022, with correct scaling on high-resolution monitors, a handful of UX fixes (mouse-wheel scrolling, automatic panel resizing per row), and even native TLS support so you can connect to today’s IRC networks. Fair warning, though, straight from the authors: this isn’t a polished relaunch, it’s an example of just how much you have to touch to get a 1996 MFC application booting on a modern Windows machine.

All of it under the MIT license, so if you feel like compiling it, poking around the expert system that decides the characters’ gestures, or just reading mid-90s code to see how they made do with 8 MB of RAM, here it is:

GitHub repository: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat