Microsoft open-sources Comic Chat, its cartoon IRC curiosity

Step back three decades to 'a period when software teams were willing to color outside the lines'

Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, its short-lived 1990s experiment in turning Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations into comic strips – and, for many users, their first encounter with Comic Sans.

Microsoft Comic Chat was released in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3. It was conceived by David "DJ" Kurlander of the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group as a new visual representation of conversation histories.

Rather than displaying the scrolling sequence of text messages still familiar today, a chat was depicted across several cartoon panels, replete with characters, backgrounds, and speech bubbles.

According to Microsoft, "the visual world of Comic Chat was the work of Jim Woodring, a highly regarded independent comic artist whose characters gave the software its distinctive look."

This was long before generative AI, and the software generated its scenes using rules....

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