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Thursday, August 27, 2026

Gigantum.net
Gadgets

Microsoft open sources Comic Chat, the 90s IRC client that helped introduce Comic Sans.

The source code for Microsoft Comic Chat is now available, opening up the workings of a project released in 1996 that turned the walls of text from chats into comic strips, generating panels and illustrations that represent the chat and are still backward-compatible with text-only clients. I wasn’t familiar with the app until now, although it apparently shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0, and used Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare’s then-new font for its speech bubbles. [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/07/fasf.webp?quality=90&strip=all]

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The source code for Microsoft Comic Chat is now available , opening up the workings of a project released in 1996 that turned the walls of text from chats into comic strips, generating panels and illustrations that represent the chat and are still backward-compatible with text-only clients.

I wasn’t familiar with the app until now, although it apparently shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0, and used Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare’s then-new font for its speech bubbles.

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