I reimplemented the comic-drawing algorithm in Ruby almost 15 years ago because I wanted to make my own daily comic based on our IRC chats. It turned out that I wasn’t as funny as I thought.
There are so many wild and wonderful things that came out of 90s Microsoft.
One favourite of mine is Microsoft Music Producer, I think it was called. You could select genres, styles, tempo and a band then it would 'compose' mid files. I used them to generate royalty-free music for silly animations.
I downloaded it but had to do the patching on my 32 bit Windows 10 computer. Once I had patched, I was able to copy the program to my 64 bit machine and run it.
I've bought so many old MSDN CD sets off Ebay looking for this program. Thanks!
Thankyou! I have been thinging of that one for many years but didn't know the name to search for. Instructions and downloads on that page works just fine with windows 10 so far. I set it to compatible to Windows 7 but not sure that is even needed.
Edit: another fun read was the methods for getting third party IRC clients to connect to MSN's IRC servers directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Chat
We were still using this for classified chat in the Navy like 5 years ago. We didn't use the comic feature, just the normal IRC client. Eventually we followed other services and went to mIRC before the .gov paid some software company a ridiculous amount of money to make a very simple Java-based IRC client called Mako. It was like a software project you would do in an intermediate Java class, no bells and whistles. Ridiculous the amount of money available to SWEs who can navigate the contracting process.
At some point Microsoft chat allowed sending executable files. This was also around the same time backorifice was very popular.
This was also around the same time most people were connecting via dialup that was bought in packs of 30 hours. Some people had unlimited time, and aparently more than one person could be using the same account at the same time.
Somehow all this events combined made all the internet kids in my neighbourhood get the same court letter with a huge internet bill one year later.
Looking back, the early days of our internet use were so weird.
We had a dial-up connection and a computer well before anyone else in our county/tri-county area in the mid-west. We also had a home line that was a party line.
All the old ladies in our small (<50) town were pissed that anytime they picked the phone up, they heard that robotic screeching noise. We were pissed that we kept getting booted every fifteen seconds.
Weird times. Why did the company even offer internet connections to a party line? What an odd thing to do.
mention of ms comic chat seems somehow incomplete without reference to JerkCity aka BoneQuest, a decades-long webcomic composed using it https://www.bonequest.com/search/?q=%23linux
It happened in the first half of 2018 (between March and May).
Kind of baffling.
Without having talked to them, my assumption is that a Florida area Jamaican restaurant reached out to them and said "hi, we're called Jerk City, can we have your web address? we'll give you $100" and they thought this was hilarious and said yes.
not to mention some of the jerkcity founders are now high level directors in major SV corps. gaze upon their works and agluhalguhalggalughalguhaluhgalguh
Jim Woodring was such an odd, but wonderful, choice of artist for this project. I thought his surreal style worked so well as a visualization of what at the time was newly called “cyberspace”. This could have been a totally flavorless corporate thing instead.
You put it perfectly! I strongly agree and came here to say what you and ncmncm said first. He's one of my favorite and most surrealistic comic artists!
His web site is currently broken but it usually works, and has lots of awesome stuff on it. I've let him know, so I hope it will be back soon.
I wish I had forgotten about this. Hopefully this webcomic's persistence is actually due to it being a PERL script riffing on dadjokes.txt and whatever reddit lol monkee cheese stuff from 2012.
Readit News
Source and artwork is available here: https://github.com/statico/spittoon
Also the example comic IS funny ;)
One favourite of mine is Microsoft Music Producer, I think it was called. You could select genres, styles, tempo and a band then it would 'compose' mid files. I used them to generate royalty-free music for silly animations.
Sadly even any mention of this is very hard to find online now. I recall there being an old website where one could download it along with extra music styles; that can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070222062521/http://www.musicm...
Edit: Changed the name to 'Microsoft Music Producer', as has been kindly identified below.
http://ents-bbs.org/viewtopic.php?f=167&t=2346
I searched the web archive and found the website I had in mind above. It has plenty of info on MMP, as well as downloads of extra music styles.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070222062521/http://www.musicm...
I've bought so many old MSDN CD sets off Ebay looking for this program. Thanks!
http://songsmith.ms/
https://youtu.be/3oGFogwcx-E
Here is a proxy script that will allow you to connect to a modern IRC server: https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15
Edit: another fun read was the methods for getting third party IRC clients to connect to MSN's IRC servers directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Chat
https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmPhBJ9Dg91wH9NUiF4dKVewazL6g6c...
Hmm. And now I'm wondering if the simplicity you describe was just skin deep... or if Mako performed TLS cert validation et al :D
Somehow all this events combined made all the internet kids in my neighbourhood get the same court letter with a huge internet bill one year later.
We had a dial-up connection and a computer well before anyone else in our county/tri-county area in the mid-west. We also had a home line that was a party line.
All the old ladies in our small (<50) town were pissed that anytime they picked the phone up, they heard that robotic screeching noise. We were pissed that we kept getting booted every fifteen seconds.
Weird times. Why did the company even offer internet connections to a party line? What an odd thing to do.
Kind of baffling.
Without having talked to them, my assumption is that a Florida area Jamaican restaurant reached out to them and said "hi, we're called Jerk City, can we have your web address? we'll give you $100" and they thought this was hilarious and said yes.
Deleted Comment
His web site is currently broken but it usually works, and has lots of awesome stuff on it. I've let him know, so I hope it will be back soon.
http://jimwoodring.com/ (EDIT: http://www.jimwoodring.com/ )
But in the meantime:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Woodring
...Oh wait, on second try: SOME variations of the url work and some don't:
http://jimwoodring.com/ and https://jimwoodring.com/ : broken with wordpress error messages
http://www.jimwoodring.com/ - works perfectly but just shows "jimwoodring.com" in the URL, but copying and pasting it gets http://www.jimwoodring.com/ -- is this a Chrome thing??!
https://www.jimwoodring.com/ - works halfway, you get the text without the pictures, which is no fun.
It is 20 years old this year, and has never missed a day.
https://www.bonequest.com/7541
(May not be SFW, depending on where you work)