We were stolen from this. Imagine the funnies we could make from this.
In 1996, Microsoft made a chatroom that turned your conversations into comic strips.
It was called Microsoft Comic Chat.
Instead of a normal text box, your messages appeared as speech bubbles over weird little black-and-white characters. The program would automatically pick poses, facial expressions, panels, and layouts.
So you could be arguing with strangers online, but it looked like a newspaper comic drawn by someone having a breakdown.
For a few years, the future of online chat looked like this.