Microsoft open sourced Comic Chat, the 1996 tool that turned IRC into comic panels
Comic Chat auto illustrated live chat conversations as comic book panels, shipped with Internet Explorer 3 and Windows 98, and localized into 24 languages. Microsoft just put it on GitHub.
Microsoft just open sourced a 1996 chat client that turned IRC conversations into comic panels in real time.
Microsoft put Comic Chat on GitHub this week: the 1996 client that auto illustrated live IRC conversations as comic book panels, complete with expressions and speech bubbles, picked automatically from what you typed.
How it actually worked
Comic Chat was built in Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC, shipped with Internet Explorer 3, bundled into Windows 98, and localized into 24 languages. It parsed chat text for tone and content, then chose a character pose and panel layout to match, turning a plain IRC log into something closer to a strip. The original team included David Kurlander, Tim Skelly, David Salesin, and comic artist Jim Woodring.
Why Microsoft is doing this now
The announcement frames it as preserving "an important piece of software history" and handing developers something to actually build on rather than read about. Microsoft's release notes include a modernization pass showing the 1990s codebase building with current Visual Studio and running on high resolution displays, which is the part that makes this more than a museum piece.
Many ideas we now take for granted in online communication can trace some of their spirit to experiments like Comic Chat.
Why a build studio cares
Comic Chat's real trick, mapping raw text to a visual state automatically, is the same category of problem as a lot of what we build now: parsing unstructured input and rendering something specific from it, just with an LLM doing the parsing instead of 1996 pattern matching on IRC syntax. Worth a read for the panel selection logic alone, three decades before anyone called this kind of thing an agent.
Next step: read Microsoft's announcement and the source on GitHub. If you are curious what an old constraint solved cleanly might teach a current build, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.