Windows Central71%
Microsoft Comic Chat, an IRC client from 30 years ago that helped popularize Comic Sans, is going open source | Windows Central 73%
By Zac Bowden63%
7/16/2026, 5:46:51 PM
Topics: Open Source Software
BS Summary: This article contains 6 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Availability Heuristic, and Optimism Bias, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 29.7% saturation with 60 hits. Analysis detected 227 faulty-reasoning hits from 202 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 66.2% and a BS Rank of 73% (4,515 of 16,682 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 72.90% of the article peer group.
Microsoft's once popular IRC client "Comic Chat" is being open sourced to celebrate its 30th anniversary.
Those who frequented the world wide web in the 90's will likely remember Comic Chat for being a unique experiment into how IRC chatting could be, featuring graphical avatars that presented chats and chatrooms in comic strip form.
"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," Microsoft's Scott Hanselman announced in a blog post today.
Although from the 90s, Comic Chat is still functional as an IRC client today, though most people likely don't use it anymore.
Still, with the app now being open source, perhaps developers and tinkerers will be more open to breathing life back into the 30 year old app.
The Comic Chat source code is now public on GitHub for anyone who wants to take a look and compile their own version.
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