Comment by boomboomsubban
2 years ago
This is probably going to spark a dumb argument that's been done to death, but aren't emoticons typographical based? Those look like pictograms or arguably early emoji.
2 years ago
This is probably going to spark a dumb argument that's been done to death, but aren't emoticons typographical based? Those look like pictograms or arguably early emoji.
They're actually overstrikes of existing characters! The PLATO terminal had some wack stuff built into it, courtesy, I suspect, of the vector buffers it was initially designed with. That kind of computational overhead limited the expansion of the system into commodity equipment, a definite cloud of doom.
We can really, really go down the rabbit hole with encoding. Wireless morse had several equivalents to "emoticons" in its text encoding, and typesetters had zillions of different emoticons they could and did fabricate. Indeed, these are the first documented examples.
PLATO is an oddball system, pre-ASCII, pre-everything. That overstrike trick kind of hints at that. So if we mean ASCII-encoded emotions, yeah, PLATO loses to CM's BBS circa 1982.