Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world’s weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late ’90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening?

Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, users communicated through cartoon avatars with messages displayed in speech bubbles inside dynamically composed comic panels. The application used an expert system to determine character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time. It shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 and was later bundled with Windows 98 and MSN before being discontinued in the early 2000s.

↫ Comic Chat’s GitHub page

Not only is the original source code now available on GitHub, there’s also a modern, updated version that can make use of larger displays and higher resolutions. There’s a deliciously ’90s website for it, too.