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I actually have a vague memory of the first time I realized that the couple of characters that were appearing before me on the screen were meant to represent a smiley face turned sideways. It was some time in the mid 90s in Boulder, CO. Boulder Valley School District had a program for students to request an account on a System V server that was being hosted up at the University of Colorado campus in the engineering center. A bunch of us had gotten accounts and were exchanging emails with the pine email client. A friend sent me an email that included ":)". Since I was using a terminal program to view emails, I had grown accustomed to seeing various control or syntax characters being printed out for different reasons. I assumed what I was seeing was something like that. Perhaps a control character that was meant to control bold font being accidentally printed out. Eventually, I realized it was a smiley face.
My recollection is even more vague, but I think it was when trying out early versions of Linux and browsing the documentation. I, too, probably had a fleeting thought of "weird control characters, must be a UNIX thing", before it finally hit me. I don't remember when and where exactly, but I do remember the sudden realization.
> Shakespeare’s work is full of clichés and his spelling was atrocious. :-)
How could you not be aware that spelling was not standardized at the time? Does this person know nothing about the history of the English language?
/s and :) should be obvious here, but I am including them anyway, just to be safe. I don't want to be accused of old fashioned trolling, and starting a flame war.
> /s and :) should be obvious here, but I am including them anyway, just to be safe. I don't want to be accused of old fashioned trolling, and starting a flame war.
If so you should be denoting it with the appropriate ~= sign:
"~= a candle, to annotate flaming messages"
:-)
I'm not sure if we should be encouraging all this candle talk, wouldn't want to ruin another elevator.
IIRC, Wittgenstein describes the usage of type to create a smile face in one of his writings and provides an example (I want to say I saw this in Culture and Value, a collection released in 1970). He died in 1951.
This is of course, not to throw shade on the authors claim to original invention. I believe that without doubt :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Precursors
> Modern emoticons were not the first instances of :) or :-) being used in text.
> In 1648, poet Robert Herrick wrote the lines:
Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)Dope! That is... older than I expected
> Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.
Fortunately, in ASCII we have a neutral spot between ( and ). I present to you the neutral marker: :-|
> It’s interesting to note that Microsoft and AOL now intercept these character strings and turn them into little pictures.
"Little pictures".
Who knew this is how it would end?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emoji_Movie
> Patrick Stewart as Poop
At one point, new-on-the-scene O'Reilly Books put out a very small book of "smileys," including buttons. I want to say 1992 or 1993. I wonder if I still have it.
In the early-to-mid 90s there were hundreds of emoticon + acronym books. They were marketed as essential reading for anyone joining the Internet.
They might be collector's items now. The sort of thing you would find in the window of the Blast From The Past store.
When I first got online we did this to smile: <G>
Adjacently, this is fun:
https://github.com/mcdwayne/CIA-Emoji-WP-Plugin/blob/master/...
⨀‿⨀
Did you know windows has a shortcut for these? Win + . then select the second tab (first is for emojis).
Seemingly called Kaomojis.
My personal favorite (with a special background of its own, never thought of dropping it in HN some day):
ಠ_ಠ
ಠ is from the kannada (a south indian language) alphabet
wow thank you for the context!
Whoa, awesome!
:-)
ROFL