📜

June 8, 2024 2:31 PM

nearly 200 emoji-like symbols found within the PI-4000, sized 12x12 pixels, were directly insertable within text and had many conceptual overlaps with the earliest 📲 [emojipedia]
posted by HearHere (8 comments total)

That was fun to read — thank you. There are gaps in my internet knowledge, and I vaguely thought of emoji as corporate emoticons. It’s neat to see the complexity and people behind their history.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:56 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

Treaty of Westphalia in emoji.

😸

posted by clavdivs at 3:07 PM on June 8 [7 favorites]

A bit of a common misperception is that the "emo" in "emoji" stands for "emotion", as in "emoticon". But emoji is actually 絵文字 (e = picture, moji = character); we just happen to live in a strange timeline where a bunch of pictographs used by japanese telephone companies in the 90s somehow became an international standard (resulting in their eventual conflation with the unrelated concept of "emoticons").
posted by etealuear_crushue at 3:11 PM on June 8 [20 favorites]

Great Scott! I don’t think I can deal with two epiphanies in one day!
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:14 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

Pocket Bell pagers

is this canon?

[excellent post, fascinating history / archaeology; finding these emojis has a real Caves of Lascaux vibe]
posted by chavenet at 3:44 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

So interesting! I would never have guessed that animal emoji would have started with a need/desire to communicate about astrological signs, but it doesn’t NOT make sense, especially since it covers both major sets. So many gems of design in that first set - the LP, rice bowl, and jaunty jacket all make me smile.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 5:06 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

I'm that one guy who absolutely despises emoji other than the ones you can type on a keyboard without having to look.

:(
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:53 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

I'm interested in the handful of shading tiles in the PI-4000 set. Those would add a lot to your text-art options!

My only complaint about modern implementations of the emoji concept is the predominance of color in a way that broke modularity, homogenized designs, and forced them to reinvent the feature with ZWJ sequences. If they had asked me, the characters should default to transparent raster or vector outlines that are the same color as the surrounding text, and then an optional secondary shading color that can be switched on.
posted by jy4m at 6:47 AM on June 9 [2 favorites]