https://blog.emojipedia.org/the-word-emoji-is-older-than-you-may-think/
“We've spent a lot of time on this blog correcting the record on when the first
emoji set actually shipped, and reporting on newly uncovered "proto-emoji" sets
from Sharp and NEC devices that predate mobile phones entirely. Now there's a
new thread to pull, and it isn't just another device from another manufacturer
with another "proto-emoji" set: this 1988 word processor manual explicitly
refers to its icon set as emoji (絵文字).
Researcher and game designer Matt Sephton, who has spent months tracking down
vintage Japanese electronics with emoji-like symbol sets built in, made this
discovery when a friend shared with him the manual for a 1988 Toshiba Rupo
JW95F word processor.
There it is: concise and plain, the term 絵文字 (e-moji), "picture" (絵) plus
"character" (文字), appearing as the column heading for the device's selectable
pictographic characters.
That's older than the oft-cited Kurita/DoCoMo i-mode set from 1999, and older
than SoftBank's 1997 Skywalker phone too, the device where, as it happens, the
word shows up in exactly the same way, labelling exactly the same kind of
thing.
But this isn't actually the earliest known instance of 絵文字 being used at all,
just the earliest we've found where it's being used quite this specifically and
intentionally, to name a discrete, selectable set of digital characters
designed to be inserted into text. The word itself is actually far, far older
than you may think, and it predates the creation of consumer technology as we
know it.”
Via Christoph S.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
