Wow. I first came across Microsoft Chat in the late 1990s, at age 11 or 12. To this day it seemed ahead of its time... avatars with multiple options of facial expressions, comic book layout. I miss it.
I wish MS would open source this! I’ve noticed it tends to segfault randomly if you connect to the wrong IRC server, so it must be riddled with security holes.
However, it beats the heck out of slack on resource utilization and functionality. :-)
Ah, the good old embrace, extend, extinguish strategy; even for something as innocuous as this. I wonder if it was that deeply baked into the company's culture that it unintentionally surfaced in apps like this.
Nothing is stopping anybody from reimplementing their own Comic Chat client using existing IRC client tech. The only issue is it bleeds over on normal servers, which is likely why Microsoft probably originally used their own servers (idr I just remember my sister using Comic Chat in the 90s).
I just installed it on Windows 10 and, if you change the configuration, it's high DPI aware and looks gorgeous on my screen! That's something I did not expect.
This post links to a website[0] which provides an interesting (but obviously unverifiable) anecdote:
> I once got an email from a US Marine Corps guard at Guantanamo Bay. They were using the program in TEXT mode to record their watch logs. All of their staions were connected together using the Comic Chat program. You see, in Comic Chat, one can save the entire log of events. He wanted to know if there was anyway to record a time stamp on each message. It was unfortunate that I did not know the answer, but I often thought that their unique use of the program was quite clever!
>Not only does Comics Mode work correctly, but I am even able to download other users' custom Comic Chat Characters (AVB file extensions)
The internet was a different place where downloading avatars over a p2p protocol directly from peers and then showing them in a chat application without any additional warning was something that could be done.
I'm not just talking about exploiting issues with malicious files (heck, they even invented their own binary format. I'm sure hat parser is totally safe), but also about what possible harassment could be done by pushing arbitrary pucture avatars to chat peers.
Something like that would never fly any more these days
To my disapproval (I'm a Linux fanboy) my partner bought a Windows laptop, and a bunch of old Windows games for the kids. Guess if the games worked on Windows ? We tried all combinations of compatibility modes. Guess where the games did work ? Yes they worked on Linux with Wine.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 55.9 ms ] threadHowever, it beats the heck out of slack on resource utilization and functionality. :-)
> I once got an email from a US Marine Corps guard at Guantanamo Bay. They were using the program in TEXT mode to record their watch logs. All of their staions were connected together using the Comic Chat program. You see, in Comic Chat, one can save the entire log of events. He wanted to know if there was anyway to record a time stamp on each message. It was unfortunate that I did not know the answer, but I often thought that their unique use of the program was quite clever!
[0]: http://www.mermeliz.com/
The internet was a different place where downloading avatars over a p2p protocol directly from peers and then showing them in a chat application without any additional warning was something that could be done.
I'm not just talking about exploiting issues with malicious files (heck, they even invented their own binary format. I'm sure hat parser is totally safe), but also about what possible harassment could be done by pushing arbitrary pucture avatars to chat peers.
Something like that would never fly any more these days