That is correct. DJ Kurlander is the creator of Comic Chat and he is credited in the blog post. I'm just the guy that made the open source release happen, with DJ's support. He retired from Microsoft 20+ years ago.
I wrote that, not AI. There's a typo: it was supposed to be, "Is the Space Jam guy still playing baseball?" I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
> I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.
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.
Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally.
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.
I take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.
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!
Thanks for this. I love the work that individuals have been putting into open sourcing historical Microsoft products.
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?
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!
Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.
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.
First of all: I wrote that I welcome the open sourcing of this code. It was literally the first sentence. I wrote it specifically for reactions like that.
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.
It probably eventually wasn't deemed important enough for that phase. In 1999 when Comic Chat ended they pivoted to their completely proprietary MSN Messenger service instead, with a stronger focus on individual-to-individual. This came after ICQ (1996) and AIM (1997).
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.
Yeah, that's right, it was all Microsoft's evil plan to extinguish proper serious legitimate grown-up fonts by rolling out Comic Sans.
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.
