Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set
blog.emojipedia.org
blog.emojipedia.org
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/絵文字文化
> 歴史的には、最初に絵文字がフォントに搭載されたのはかなり古くからあり、文字コードに搭載されるようになったのは、1959年のCO-59コードで野球ボールが採用されたことが始まりである。
"Historically, the first inclusion of emoji in fonts already having happened very long ago, if we consider the inclusion of an emoji in character codes, that started with 1959's CO-59 code's adoption of a baseball symbol."
As far as the origin of the word emoji (絵文字), this page:
https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%B5%B5%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97-1770
attributes an early use of "emonji" to author Tsubouchi Shōyō, in an 1891 work called Harunoya Manpitsu (春迺屋漫筆), in reference to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Although there are all sorts of interesting per-historic emoji-like stuff. For example CP437 (from maybe 1981?) included few symbols that were quite emoji-like, including a smiley face. At the Japanese front, MZ-80K (from 1979) character set also had some symbols, but I doubt those were ever used in communication much.
I tried looking into other early character sets (such as JIS X 0201/0208), but couldn't find much anything emoji-like.
I do think the early Japanese cell phone emoji sets deserve some recognition from the fact of them being designed (and widely used) for communications. I have the distinct impression that for example the CP437 smiley was not really all that much used beyond some games and such, despite the character set itself being fairly common.
One element is already one more than the minimum required for a "set".
If the empty set is cited as evidence for existential claims, then we should complain, but that it's empty, not that it isn't a set. :)
> couldn't quickly find any reference on CO-59.
First hit on Google for "CO-59コード"
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO-59
The link to the .jpg image is unfortunately broken, but the text describes what is included: hiragana, katakana, the dakuten and handakuten attributed characters in both （ば、ぱ、バ、パ、…）, the small っ、ゃ、ゅ、ょ in both, the touyou kanji (daily use characters, predecessor of jouyou concept), some punctuation marks and "野球ボールの絵文字" (baseball emoji).
Article says that CO-59 was used in the first Japanese language word-processor, the JW-10:
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/JW-10
This is what appears to be the original source for that image: http://etlcdb.db.aist.go.jp/etlcdb/etln/etl2/e2code.jpg
I just replaced the nonworking URL in the above page.
It doesn't just have a baseball but some symbols in the same group: diamond, triangle, star, filled and empty circle. It includes roman characters in upper case, circled characters, double digit characers up to 59 (presumably for compact time representation) and other things.
Wasn’t it J-Phone -> Vodaphone -> SoftBank?