[outintospace]

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.

[NDlurker]

Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it

[outintospace]

I used it to create a presentation for my talk at a conference last year. https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html

[9dev]

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 Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless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an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.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!

[9dev]

…and it's also entirely in character of you representing Microsoft to not reply to my comment :-)

[DonHopkins]

…and it's also entirely in character of you representing yourself to reply to your own comment :-)

[runjake]

Jerk City lives on, and is now known as Bonequest. Here's today's comic:

https://www.bonequest.com/

[MBCook]

Wow just about to hit 10k comics too.

No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them.

[denkmoon]

Man those are absolutely deranged. Awesome.

[amiga386]

T DEUCE ME TOO HUGALUGAHGLGHLAHALHGGGGG

https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/

[joshu]

HLAGHAGHLAGHLAGH

[astrange]

On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it.

[compass_copium]

You should (I assume it's Rands), he clearly does not want to be rembered as a Jerkcity guy now that he's a Serious Palantir Poobah.

[mbac32768]

I wonder if bong hits ever helped him with his Makefile.

[dathanb82]

I mean, he left Palantir over a decade ago and now he’s supposedly retired (again) - I bet he’s pretty chill about it these days.

[fortran77]

I once worked with nearly all of those guys! A very interesting bunch....

[csans-cstrip]

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?

[resonanttoe]

Really nice work! This is so very very cool.

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!

[compass_copium]

Amazing timing, Jerkcity hits 10,000 strips in like two weeks.

[timbroddin]

Thanks so much for this! This really brought some nostalgic tears in my eyes.

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-...

[zuzululu]

amazing i'd love to have the hardware to run this

[tangenter]

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.

[hombre_fatal]

Man I hadn’t even thought of MSN Gaming Zone again until now yet spent who knows how many hours on it.

[lysace]

Open sourcing code is always welcome.

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.

[MBCook]

Why is it every time some company people hate does anything good, no matter how trivial, people have to trash it?

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.

[lysace]

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.

[krige]

So where's the extinguish? You can't stop proving your point halfway through unless you're implying you did not actually have a point.

[lysace]

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).

[krige]

Apples and oranges.

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.

[MBCook]

You put one sentence in saying it was good, then the rest of the (admittedly short) ent complaining about behavior from 30 years ago.

Why does it matter to today? It just makes your first sentence feel like a backhanded compliment.

[psawaya]

They're calling it "the most Hacker News comment of all time"

[DonHopkins]

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.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole

[runlaszlorun]

Ha! I didn't get the reference at first but hilarious...