Microsoft open-sources Comic Chat, the IRC client that gave us Comic Sans

Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, the IRC client that automatically turned conversations into comic-book panels with illustrated characters, speech bubbles and expressions — and helped introduce the world to a little font called Comic Sans. The code is now available on GitHub.

Chat as comic panels

In the mid-1990s, internet chat was largely walls of scrolling text. Comic Chat, started in 1995 by David Kurlander in Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group, took a different route: participants appeared as illustrated characters, and the software made real-time editorial decisions about how a conversation should look. If someone wrote that they liked something, the character might point to itself; text that read as anger could make it frown or cross its arms.

Built in Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC and released in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3, it was more than a clever skin for IRC. Kurlander, Tim Skelly and David Salesin published a paper at SIGGRAPH '96 describing what they had built as an experiment in automatic illustration construction and layout. Its distinctive look came from Jim Woodring, an independent comic artist who was handed transcripts of real chat sessions to illustrate.

Where Comic Sans found its home

Comic Sans, designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, found its first real home in Comic Chat, where its informal, hand-lettered feel matched the software's speech bubbles. The client was localized into 24 languages and bundled with Windows 98 — a detail that says as much about the era as about the product.

Why open source it now

Microsoft says the release preserves an important piece of software history. Alongside the original snapshots, the repository includes a few AI-powered modernization attempts that get this 1990s-era C++ and MFC code building with current Visual Studio tools, connecting to modern IRC servers and running legibly on today's high-resolution Windows machines. The company describes them as worked examples rather than polished re-releases.

For developers, historians and retro-computing enthusiasts, it is a chance to read code from a period when the internet was still discovering what it wanted to become and the rules of online communication had not yet been written. Microsoft's framing is that innovation often starts with ideas that are playful and unconventional — and that Comic Chat, still remembered and still run thirty years later, is one of them.