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# Microsoft Goes Nostalgic In Newest Open-Source Drop: Comic Chat Open-Sourced After 30 Years

**[Phoronix](https://daily.dev/sources/phoronix)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, the 1990s IRC client featuring comic-style avatars that shipped with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. Released under an MIT license on GitHub, the move is framed as software preservation. Microsoft engineers also included AI-powered modernization experiments showing the original C++ and MFC codebase can be updated to build with current Visual Studio tools and run on modern high-resolution displays. Comic Chat is historically notable for introducing the Comic Sans font.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS>

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---

Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#microsoft](https://daily.dev/tags/microsoft)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/microsoft-goes-nostalgic-in-newest-open-source-drop-comic-chat-open-sourced-after-30-years-qpadgrb9e)

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