I can't believe this is still going
??
> HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL, interj. An all-purpose sound, denoting the act of performing oral sex, the act of receiving oral sex, taking drugs, writing your Congressman, misdialing your party and getting that annoying series of tones, or sitting perfectly still and making no noise whatsoever.
https://www.bonequest.com/tags/cocksucking-noises
(To solve the CAPTCHA: "spigot" is the human face.)
Ran comic chat on a freshly installed Win98 (or 95, don’t remember) Pentium II.
So it's a shame that microsoft is blocking non-corporate browsers from accessing this news release, "The request is blocked. 20260716T162640Z-r17d8486fc4rbjkdhC1CHI16pc00000008m000000000a54t" I imagine most people who care about MS Comic Chat aren't using Chrome or Edge. A better URL since MS is blocking might be https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS or just the github repo that's in another comment.
But yeah, until it happens to themselves people generally don't believe anyone else's lived experience and react very negatively to it.
It sounds like person in charge of "Hey do you want Copilot? How about now? How about now? And now?! Here's another popup! Do you want it now? Why not?! Have you tried Copilot?" Etc...
(I know about title inflation, he's probably not in charge of all that much, but still)
So when you see something like "Azure Copilot 365" you can pretend they wrote, fully generically, "Online Cloud AI".
If you see a button labelled "Copilot" you understand it would've said "AI" if they were any other company.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
Of course, all of this is completely retarded.
v1.0-pre and v1.0 share the same internal version number (rup 206, "Beta 2") but differ in ~99 of 111 shared source files [1]
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%2...
[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...
[1]: https://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SLM-1.5-Guides.p...
SLM's "architecture" reminds me a lot of Microsoft Mail postoffices-- a file share that every user interacts with and no actual server-side code (i.e. just using file sharing semantics for clients to interact). (Lots of apps, not just MSFT, did that back in the 90s and it was _hell_.)
Based on what I've read about source control at Microsoft I'd guess Comic Chat straddled the use of both SLM and Source Depot (post W2K, from what I've seen).
Neither did CVS. That was one of the big sellers of Subversion (maybe even the seller)
CVS in essence was just remote access to RCS files, where each file was handled independently, which caused lots of trouble to recover a specific state of work, especially when including deleted (or even worse: replaced) files.
The issue, as I remember it, is that Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character, rather than relying entirely on contextual cues. This was essentially done by adding some nonsense string to every message, which presumably could be decoded by other Comic Chat users, but read like spammy noise to everyone else. I know it did that, because I remember downloading Comic Chat to check it out, but I forget whether it was the default or not.
># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)
It was fun messing with these folks, though, since they were often oblivious to IRC and internet culture in general. Or they were just completely tech illiterate, but somehow ended up starting Comic Chat, and somehow ended up on our obscure servers.
It was pretty easy to do. Had to have been, because I was a pretty terrible programmer at the time.
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
Given that MSFT is all in on Rust and WinUI now, maybe they can try doing a full port similar to Bun using Copilot. Anthropic has been milking their Bun port attempt for as much as they can.
The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon tail dragging behavior just right...
one of the teachers made a video overview of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw
It's easy to criticize but remember, this was back in the days of supporting IE6 and XHR was still relatively new!
Flex's standard UI library was filled with bluish-gray gradients and verdana :)
Here's an article which has a screenshot with a bunch of controls: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-application...
Microsoft was at one of its' most powerful evil phases it had ever seen during that phase, and to pretend it was some kind of antithesis to 'corporate metric please' is a disservice to history.
I liked comic chat , and I see that your actual point is more just "ai bad" , but 88-99 microsoft was brutally corporate metric pleasing.
see also : Microsoft antitrust history Microsoft FTC investigation 1990 Microsoft DOJ antitrust 1993 Microsoft 1994 consent decree Microsoft anticompetitive licensing Microsoft per-processor licensing Microsoft consent decree Judge Stanley Sporkin Microsoft vaporware antitrust Microsoft market foreclosure 1990s Gary Kildall Microsoft controversy Stac Electronics / DoubleSpace Microsoft Stac Electronics lawsuit Microsoft DoubleSpace patent infringement Microsoft Intuit acquisition antitrust
feels like selling an old bicycle on craigslist with the amount of things you can tag M$ with.
MSN Chat was the full corporate bundled with windows program that matches your description of ‘90s Microsoft. A non-monetized chat app targeting decentralized protocols definitely was not.
To imply that every single person there was evil to their core simply by association is utterly ridiculous.
I doubt the guy who created Minesweeper was dreaming of world domination while working there
But it was in the timeframe where the "browser wars" gained momentum, where Microsoft Network tried to "Microsoftify" the Internet etc.
Even if it was a research project by research focussed people it fit in the bigger strategy and gave a friendly face.
I'll fork it and have fun with it again, with the help of AI of course ;-)
I have a vivid memory of my sister and my mom in Puerto Rico, on our packardbell computer, hearing it making dial-up noises for days or hours, until they finally got online. I also remember seeing my sister using that program in the 90s, I must have been 5 to 7 years old, she was a teenager.
Fun fact, it's an IRC client that injects its own schema and then other Comic Chat IRC compatible clients interpret it and display it. You can go on freenet (DONT GO INTO POPULATED CHANNELS!) and go into like #hn-comic-chat or something and others who join will see what you see!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It's depressing that even a blog post about open sourcing a two decade old piece of software has such a hard deadline the author feels pressured to publish before they're ready.
Maybe not in the USA, but globally I think it's likely that more people watched Space Jam than ever watched an NBA match. Professional basketball is a niche sport in most of the world.
I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.
What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?").
I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress!
No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them.
However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc.
Someone at MS made a fun IRC client. Thats it. It’s a WILDLY different world than 30 years ago and MS is a different company.
They released old code for those interested. Celebrate it.
They embraced the Internet; in this case IRC. This followed Bill Gates' well-publicised memo "The Internet Tidal Wave" a year earlier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet...). It didn't happen because "someone at MS made a fun IRC client".
They extended the open IRC protocol with proprietary extensions hidden inside CTCP (Client-to-Client Protocol) messages to support "the fun stuff": https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20... (you need to be logged in to Microsoft's Github for code search to work nowadays.)
The outcome of this effort: Comic Chat was interoperable with regular IRC clients, but when two Comic Chat users connected, they could see richer interactions.
MSN was aimed at, well AIM, to the point where AIM used protocol flaws to block MSN clients. And it doesn't track that they'd just abandon IRC considering it was a period of absolutely massive growth for the protocol. It's more likely there was no intent to EEE IRC.
Why does it matter to today? It just makes your first sentence feel like a backhanded compliment.
JFC dude, the US Government is being taken over by narcissistic fascists, currenty embracing, extending, and extinguishing Democracy itself, and you chose this hill to die on.
It doesn’t even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I’m famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I’m in your signs. I’m in your browsers. I’m in your instant messengers. I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature, and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book-inspired, sans-serif badassery.
Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.
Comic chat was a phenomenal pain in the arse in the 90s for any IRC channel :P But it's still such a great and important piece of IRC history as a whole. It's amazing cool to see it open sourced and preserved this way.
It's amazing to see people do a tonne of work to get things like this and 3D Movie Maker - open sourced. I'd never thought I'd see the day!
I notice there are two (identical) copies of the Comic Sans .ttf in the repo; are they also covered by the terms of the MIT license?
According to “otfinfo -i”, they’re an older version than the one typically packaged on Linux (https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/files/the%20fonts...). Do you think you could swing an official release of the latest and/or historical versions of Comic Sans under MIT or another appropriate license like SIL OFL?
I asked Fable to create a Mac port this weekend: - https://github.com/TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos - Write-up: https://broddin.be/bringing-microsoft-comic-chat-to-the-mac-...
I look forward to seeing someone use this as a pipeline for AI video creation (and I don't see that as a bad thing fyi)
if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) {
Totally understand it from a security and maintenance perspective, but things were more fun back then.
https://orsenthil.github.io/cmx.js/
https://senthil.learntosolveit.com/posts/2026/06/17/xkcd-dia...
Zig's creator can't stop himself:
Are you still using Zig?
30 years later and I still cringe at the memories. (The problem was not the client, it was me, heh.)
This really resonated with me. Too much development work today feels like colouring in predefined boxes. Love to see some software that thought way out of the box and got institutional support.
“After we get through round 3 what’s our exit strategy?”
“Exit strategy? It’s a tiki head on IRC. No one is paying us anything. Just enjoy it.”
But I remember it fondly.
I still bring that up when I get to discussing the weird days of the Internet when it felt like people were just trying all kinds of things left and right.
I added some updates, ignore bots, new expressions, diff message bubble behavior, more panels, custom avatars, colors, etc.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole
>Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
One other place: We shipped The Sims 1 using Comic Sans, and it did ok.
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...
The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-1-crowd-sitter-1f478b...
That text would have sounded a whole lot more convincing if it had actually used Comic Sans...
EDIT: turns out it actually does, or it tries to. The paragraphs have "font-family:'Comic Sans', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Marker Felt';". But, as a Comic Sans hating Linux user, I of course don't have the first two installed, and no idea what this Marker Felt he is speaking of is! He could have used a Comic Sans lookalike webfont, or at least added a generic "sans-serif" fallback, but since he didn't, the browser falls back to a serif font.
If you use eww to browse the web like rms, you can put this in your .emacs file:
(set-face-attribute 'default nil
:family "Comic Sans MS"
:height 420)