Microsoft Just Open-Sourced the App That Drew Your Chats as Comics
Microsoft has just open-sourced Comic Chat. Back in nineteen ninety-six, it turned everything you typed into a comic strip.
Your chat, drawn as a comic strip.
It was a chat client. But instead of a scrolling wall of text, your conversation came out as a comic, with cartoon characters, speech bubbles, and panel after panel. The art was by the independent comic artist Jim Woodring.
It directed the whole strip — from your text.
Here's the clever part. From your text alone, the app directed the whole strip. It picked which characters appeared, their poses and expressions, the shape of every balloon, when to cut to a new panel, even the zoom. All in real time. This came out of Microsoft Research, published at SIGGRAPH.
It even drew people who never installed it.
And it worked with anyone. Comic Chat spoke plain IRC, so people on ordinary text clients were assigned characters automatically. The whole conversation still drew as a comic on your side, even when no one else was running it.
Where Comic Sans found its first home.
Now, a footnote most people miss. Comic Sans was designed in nineteen ninety-four, and it found its first real home right here, in these speech bubbles. Microsoft's own announcement puts it plainly. So Comic Sans is their fault. A little bit.
MIT-licensed. Archived. And it still builds.
It's all up now under the MIT license, archived as a piece of history. But it isn't just a museum piece. The release ships worked rebuilds that get the original nineties code compiling, and back on IRC today.
Words into pictures, automatically. 1996.
A nineteen ninety-six experiment in turning plain words into pictures, automatically. Now anyone can open it up and see exactly how it worked.
