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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

When I clicked the link I thought it would be about something that confused me for a while: What do people mean when they write a capital J in their emails? I eventually figured out that it's because Outlook automatically converts a smiley emoticon into a WingDings (an old Microsoft icon font from before that term became popularized on the web) version, which happens to have J as the character for a smiling face. View that on a machine that doesn't have the WingDings font installed, and you just get a capital J. Raymond Chen blogged about it too: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...

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Yup, Microsoft jumped at just the wrong moment on this stuff.

Today you just go "Eh, text is Unicode" and any weird corner cases go in the Private Use Area bucket never to be seen again.

And in the 1980s you'd go "Eh, text is ASCII" and just tell office workers that too bad they can't have an emoticon in their email, try writing :) instead.

But just at that moment where Windows exploded and everybody was getting a PC with a graphical user interface there was that awkward moment where it seemed reasonable to act as though text was arbitrary indexes into a font and doesn't actually _mean_ anything except that a lot of the fonts map to ASCII. So now you can write [HN removes actually Emoji] but it doesn't mean [HN removed the same emoji here] it just looks that way on PCs with the exact same font.

And that mistake infected Microsoft Office and all of Windows. I wrote a presentation on a work PC in about 1995 and then my boss printed it from her work Mac, and on every single sheet of the presentation the trademark symbol was replaced by some other symbol Macs had because of this useless ambiguity.

There are so many things Microsoft was ahead of the times. For example, they had what are now 'Electron apps' in the 1990's (hta files). And how I wheep when I look back at the power of COM, how I complained about it back when I didn't understand it, and what could have if we'd had proper object technology today.

Windows also had some chat application, hidden within the Windows folder, that allowed you to draw comic book style panels and converse using those over a network. I have never actually seen it used live, but it seemed like an interesting concept.

Under the hood Microsoft Comic Chat was a relatively generic IRC client. There's an interesting community of folks still randomly using it and you can find questionably legal, definitely unsupported downloads in places.

Honestly Comic Chat is one of the best things to ever come out of Microsoft. I miss it.

> power of COM [...], and what could have if we'd had proper object technology today.

Editors which can always crash, because they are as stable as the least stable plugin? Formulas you can no longer edit because you do not have that specific formula editor installed? Completely closed and proprietary binary storage formats? Security as weak as the weakest app installed on your machine?

Granted, in the 1990's, COM was probably a pretty good thing -- it was very fast and efficient, at the expense of stability. Today, I'd prefer different tradeoff -- stable, secure and open; and if I have to wait 5 seconds for my auto-rendered markdown to get updated, it's OK, I can do so.

Unicode has a couple of inter-related symbols blocks that preserve (almost) everything in Wingdings and Webdings, as it should. I'm surprised there aren't more "converter tools" between the original font encodings and Unicode preserving random usages of those *dings fonts. Exchange could have done that for particular Outlook clients. Word could prompt an option to optionally convert scattered usages in old DOCs.

(Office has at least moved to full Unicode rather than random Wingdings/Webdings embeddings in the last few versions, but given the long tail of the Office install base it will probably still be something like a half-decade to a decade before we see the last of the random dings.)

Someone even believed that the capital J was a Microsoft thing. He used it himself in his answers to Microsoft. Confusion and then hilarity ensued.

(Source: link in parent)

This confused me for a long time. I thought the person was signing off their email with their initial - which happened to begin with J.

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