Emojis: The Complete History 📚📖
Emojis have become an integral part of our daily communication. So much so that it’s hard to imagine a time before the characters graced our screens. But they do have an origin story, and it’s underpinned by a fascinating journey across the globe (Spoiler Alert: Apple didn’t invent emojis). Join me as we uncover where emojis originated and why they were created.
But, before exploring the birth of emojis, we need to acknowledge their predecessors. I’m not talking about hieroglyphs (though you could make the argument that emojis are just a re-birth of the ancient Egyptian writing system). I’m talking about emoticons. If you grew up in the 90s — talking late into the night with your friends on AIM, you may also remember formulating character combinations to make these creative smiley faces. For that you can thank Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon.
In 1982, Professor Fahlman proposed the adoption of joke markers on user posts to an internal online bulletin board (a.k.a. bboard) after noticing that multiple joke posts were being misinterpreted. Text doesn’t effectively convey the context you get from other forms of communication. You can’t experience another person’s vocal tonality…
