Posted Jul 16, 2026 at 11:52 PM UTCRMicrosoft 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.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Richard Lawler
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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