GoKawiilThe chat client that brought Comic Sans to the world is now on GitHub
Today, we’re excited to announce the open-source release of Microsoft Comic Chat, the chat client that automatically turned conversations within Internet Relay Chat (IRC) into comic panels featuring illustrated characters, speech bubbles, and expressions, and helped introduce the world to a little font called Comic Sans.
Yes, that Comic Sans. Originally designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, Comic Sans found its first real home in Comic Chat, where its informal, hand-lettered feel matched the software’s speech-bubble conversations perfectly.
For many people, Comic Chat is a nostalgic artifact from the early days of the internet as we transitioned from technologies like telnet, Usenet, and IRC to the largely visual web that we enjoy today. For others, it’s a legendary piece of Microsoft history they have only heard about in stories, screenshots, and debates about typography. Now, developers, historians, retro computing enthusiasts, and anyone who appreciates a wonderfully unconventional idea can explore the source code for themselves.
A different vision for online communication
Today we’re accustomed to messaging apps with reactions, stickers, GIFs, avatars, video, and AI-generated content. But in the mid-1990s, internet chat was largely walls of scrolling text.
Rather than displaying messages as plain text, Comic Chat presented participants as illustrated characters. Conversations unfolded in comic panels, with speech bubbles, expressions, and gestures generated from what people typed. If someone wrote “I like that,” the character might point to itself. If the text suggested anger, the character might frown or cross its arms. It was quirky, ambitious, occasionally chaotic, and surprisingly forward-looking.
Many ideas we now take for granted in online communication can trace some of their spirit to experiments like Comic Chat.
The people who built it
David “DJ” Kurlander, working in the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group, conceived the idea of a new visual representation of conversational histories, and started developing Comic Chat in 1995. Built in Visual C++ 4.0 and MFC, Comic Chat was released in 1996 with the Internet Explorer 3 web browser.
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