Microsoft open-sources Comic Chat, the 1996 IRC client that spread Comic Sans

On July 16, 2026, Microsoft published the source code of Comic Chat, its 1996 comic-strip IRC client, to GitHub under the MIT License.

A 1996 chat client, unshelved

The repository sits at github.com/microsoft/comic-chat. It contains the original C++ that shipped when Internet Explorer 3.0 came out on August 13, 1996, when Microsoft was still giving its browser away in an effort to overtake Netscape Navigator. The project description on the GitHub page reads, in Microsoft's own words: "Comic Chat renders your Internet Relay Chat conversations as automatically generated comic strips."

Comic Chat did exactly that. Underneath the interface, it was an ordinary IRC client speaking the standard Internet Relay Chat protocol, so its users could sit in the same rooms as text-only IRC users on Undernet, EFnet, and other public networks. On screen, however, every message you and your correspondents typed was rendered into a scrolling black-and-white comic strip, with cartoon avatars, speech bubbles, and panels drawn on the fly.

The release was authored by Robert Standefer, principal program manager on Microsoft's Copilot Acceleration Team, and announced by Scott Hanselman, vice president and member of technical staff at Microsoft and GitHub. Within the first day the repository had gathered more than 350 stars and reached the front page of Hacker News. Consumer software from the mid-1990s rarely survives in readable form; this release now sits alongside earlier openings of MS-DOS and GW-BASIC in Microsoft's slowly widening historical archive.

How the comic strip actually got drawn

Comic Chat was conceived in 1995 by David "DJ" Kurlander, a researcher inside Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group in Redmond. Kurlander, together with Microsoft researcher Tim Skelly and University of Washington graphics professor David Salesin, published a peer-reviewed technical paper on the system at SIGGRAPH 1996, titled "Comic Chat," in the conference proceedings, pages 225 to 236. Bill Gates personally demonstrated the client during a keynote speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on May 29, 1996, several months before the product officially shipped.

The character art and the illustrated backgrounds were drawn by Jim Woodring, an independent Seattle underground cartoonist best known outside Microsoft for the surreal wordless strip "Frank." Woodring drew roughly a dozen preset characters, including a young woman with dark hair named Anna, who was assigned as the default avatar for new users, alongside a suit-wearing salesman, a cat, and a robot.

The generative logic sat on top of Woodring's art. According to Microsoft's own README, the 1996 client automatically decided "character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time." It made those choices by scanning each outgoing message for cues such as capital letters, exclamation marks, and greeting phrases. A user who wanted to override the software's guess could reach for the on-screen "emotion wheel," a circular selector of eight facial expressions ranging from happy to angry to shy, tucked into the bottom-left corner of the chat window.

Because Comic Chat had to exchange those expressions with other Comic Chat clients while still coexisting with text-only IRC, the software quietly prepended a small hidden control code to the front of every outgoing IRC message. A user on a plain text client saw a slightly garbled first character; another Comic Chat user saw a grinning, sulking, or shouting avatar drawn to match.

The font it left behind

Comic Chat's most durable legacy is not the client itself. It is a typeface.

The installer quietly dropped the Comic Sans MS font into the Windows system fonts folder so that word balloons in the comic strip would look handwritten rather than typeset. Comic Sans MS was designed inside Microsoft in 1994 by typographer Vincent Connare, originally so that a cartoon dog named Rover in the discontinued Microsoft Bob product would not be forced to speak in Times New Roman. It was not created for Comic Chat. It was adopted by Comic Chat, and then carried along for the ride.

That ride turned out to be enormous. Comic Chat was later renamed Microsoft Chat and shipped again with Internet Explorer 4.0, Internet Explorer 5.0, Windows 98, and Windows 2000, before Microsoft quietly removed it starting with Internet Explorer 6. Every copy dropped Comic Sans onto the system. Because Comic Chat rode along with the browser, and the browser rode along with the operating system, Comic Sans became one of the most widely distributed typefaces of the personal computing era, met first by millions of ordinary Windows users through a chat client most of them never quite understood.

Comic Chat itself was localized into 24 different languages and, in the words of David Kurlander, reached "millions of users throughout the world." Microsoft's own MSN Chat servers turned off Comic Chat's comic protocol in 2001, effectively ending it as a mainstream product after roughly five years of consumer use. The final shipping version was Microsoft Chat 2.5, released in March 1999, and it stands as the last Microsoft consumer product to ship a public IRC client.

Inside the repository

The archive Microsoft has now put on GitHub contains four historical source snapshots, labeled v1.0-pre, v1.0, v2.1b, and v2.5-beta-1. The original client was written in C++ using Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0 and Microsoft Foundation Classes, targeting 16-bit and 32-bit Windows on the PC, and the code reads that way: a rare, unedited glimpse of a mid-1990s Microsoft consumer codebase, warts and all.

The repository also includes two "modernized" branches, labeled v1.0-pre-modern and v2.5-beta-1-modern. These build under current Visual Studio, add DPI-aware rendering for high-resolution Windows displays, and can connect to today's IRC servers. Microsoft says the modernization effort was assisted by AI coding tools that helped port the 30-year-old Visual C++ code to compile against modern Windows headers, an unusually candid detail given the codebase in question.

The license is MIT. Any programmer who wants to fork the client, extend the emotion wheel, add new characters, or point it at a private modern IRC network can now do so without asking Microsoft for permission.

Why this release matters

The technical case for opening Comic Chat is thin. It is not a product Microsoft plans to revive, and there is no obvious commercial reason to publish it in 2026. The historical case is stronger. Comic Chat was one of the strangest consumer experiments of the browser-war era, an ordinary text protocol wrapped inside an automatic newspaper comic strip, built inside Microsoft Research and drawn by an independent underground cartoonist. Almost no artifact from that period of Windows survives in a form outside developers can actually read.

The release also puts a specific number on the passage of time. Thirty years separate the first public release of Comic Chat, on August 13, 1996, from the moment its source code appeared on GitHub. In that interval the client's protocol was switched off, its host operating systems were retired, and the font it quietly seeded outlived it many times over. What is now public is not the running product but the recipe for it: the C++ that decided, thousands of times a second in 1996, which cartoon face should appear next to which sentence.

Sources

• microsoft/comic-chat on GitHub
• Microsoft Comic Chat, Wikipedia (David Kurlander's project history)
• Comic Chat, SIGGRAPH 1996 proceedings, pages 225 to 236