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Comment by WaffleIronMaker | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see the spread of emoji attributed to Microsoft in the initial sentences. It's possible that the author may be referring to the smiley faces in extended character pages, or maybe Webdings, but I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically, which I believe to have been petitioned by Google and popularized by Apple.

Interesting article either way.

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Because it's wrong.

Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, a use more similar to "emoticon" from the 90s… that word seems to have faded into obscurity, largely supplanted by "emoji")

Even "emoticons"¹, or pictographs replacing some text like ":-)" (which is how they were called before the west imported "emoji", largely because it showed up in phone IMEs after its inclusion in Unicode) were definitely a thing in the late 90s. I suspect AIM must have had them before Messenger, but frankly, I didn't think anyone actually used Messenger except maybe business types?

Everyone I seemed to know was on AIM, with a few odd exceptions on Yahoo, if they were normal. If they were more nerdy, IRC, but that was text based. (Though some clients would still translate certain text sequences into pictures. I'm pretty sure, e.g., Trillian could/would, but I don't remember when I adopted it. But it could have been earlier than 2003.)

¹The picture version. As I recall the usage of this word in the late 90s/early '00s, it could mean either ":-)" as text, or the pictogram version thereof, largely because clients at the time would just convert between the two freely. One end might send text, but the receiving client would pictogram it.

On chat applications: In Finland no one used AIM and everyone used messenger.

I suspect this was the norm also elsewhere in Europe. I am talking about Messenger 4.6 that came built in with windows xp and its later versions, not the business version.

The most popular choice in Germany used to be ICQ, at least based on my own friend group and various conversations I've had over the years.

In the Netherlands, MSN Messenger (commonly abbreviated just 'MSN') was essentially a monopoly, although at that time it was only used by young people (older people still just called each other on the phone).

With the rise of smartphones though, it ended up being supplanted by WhatsApp, with the ill-conceived migration to Skype killing off most of the last stragglers.

> Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones,

Emoji as originally created/used in Japan were not Unicode, Unicode emoji only came many years later, so referring to non-unicode emoji as emoji isn't improper and doesn't dilute the term.

But the MSN Messenger emoticons from Microsoft were not those Japanese emoji. That term was only popularized with the iPhone.

I didn't say they were, I didn't say anything about MSN messenger. What I said is that Japanese emoji were not originally implemented with Unicode, therefore non-Unicode emoji are not improper or diluted emoji. Emoji does not imply Unicode, Unicode is just an implementation detail of modern emoji, it isn't and never was a defining attribute of emoji; for the first several years of emoji's existence in Japan, Unicode wasn't involved.

I think it's a little unfair to attribute it to Microsoft and MSN Messenger as it was a concept that originated on Japanese phones AFAIK.

Also Microsoft's emojis are currently the worst by a mile out of the big tech companies.

The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.

Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts.

See https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html

They are not the "smiley" / "emoticon" character art stuff like :-) or =ò.ó= or whatever.

Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan.

Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively.

MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.

I'm fairly sure ICQ had a handful of smileys in 1996

Yeah, that table in the link contain 176 characters that begins with weather symbols, of which five are faces in second to last row - nine if I include snowman, googly eyes(Slack/GitHub "ack" icon), dog and cat faces. That's mere 3%(5%) of already small set, vs page after pages of trivially distinct human flesh in Apple Emoji.

You're using the Japanese term to obscure. Emoticons were invented first and they are both character based and image based.

Later, people started using the term "emojis" for image emoticons and now some people say only text emoticons are real emoticons.

Just for reference, the Japanese term for emoticons is kaomoji (“face characters”), distinct from emoji.

Image emoticons did exist (every 2000s IM app and social media site had them), but largely died off with the popularization of Japanese emoji.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

Web forums like UBB already had what we called "smilies" in 1998 with graphical emotive faces you could include in your posts, so that concept of image emotes predates the Japanese emoji.

Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

But now services like Slack and Mastodon have what they call "custom emoji" which hijacks the term and takes us back to 1998 web forums again.

You’re repeating the word “emote”, but “emoji” has no etymological connection to “emote” or “emotion”, it just means “picture character” in Japanese.

I know that, but it's not relevant to the point. The whole article is talking about smiles and emotions conveyed in text, so that's the context.

The name doesn't matter. Forum smilies also had a bunch of non-faces/emotions (my favorite was the "stink lizard" - still not sure what that was supposed to convey) but they're not interesting to the discussion.

i strongly suspect that the reason we call them "emojis" rather than "smilies" is due to the "emo" in "emoji". 100% of english speakers without any japanese knowledge associate the "emo" in "emoji" with "emotion"

> Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

That's not quite right. The Unicode emoji we use today are directly descendant from the emoji that were on Japanese phones.

That's how emoji ended up on our keyboard: Apple added them to the Japanese iPhone keyboard to be compatible with Japanese carriers; users in the west discovered this and started enabling Japanese input on their phones to use them; finally they became so popular that Apple (and Samsung etc.) also enabled them for non-Japanese keyboards.

If not for the original Japanese emoji, chances are that every website would still have their own smileys, instead of there being a single, interoperable set.

That's the point I was clumsily trying to make.

But now that "custom emoji" on sites like Slack and Mastodon are a thing, the term "emoji" is losing it's meaning and reverting to meaning the same thing we had before.

Yeah the original way to get emojis on iPhone was to go in and enable a keyboard hidden among the Japanese category of languages in settings. While apps existed that just basically gave directions for how to enable that.

MSN messenger had a ton of emojis and at the time (around 2000), in my experience, they were used on messenger a lot more than on AIM or ICQ. This is, of course, in the west.

As far as Unicode, the impetus for inclusion, while petitioned by Google, was at least officially due to enabling compatibility with Japanese phones where emoji were also quite popular.

Those were emoticons, they developed separately from the Japanese emoji that we use today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

They were a fixed set of pictures that you could put inline with the text in a message; despite the differing origin, I don't see the distinction.

The distinction is twofold:

1) The term ‘emoji’ came along with the Japanese emoji on the iPhone. Nobody at the time called MSN/forum emoticons ‘emoji’, so it’s a neologism to say that MSN had emoji.

2) Emoji are a fixed, standardized set that works the same way across the entire OS. 2000s emoticons were implemented separately on each app and website, with differing support and designs everywhere.

Some contemporary apps (like Slack and Discord) choose to override the system emoji style and provide their own shortcodes though, so I guess they are like a hybrid of emoji and traditional emoticons.

That first paragraph really put me off the article to be honest. Why read an article on emoji by someone who doesn't know what emoji are?

At the same time, I do realise "emoji" is now often being used as a generic term that encompasses both true emoji (unicode-based) and general emoticon images.

I've never heard emoticons referred to as emoji, mainly because people don't use emoticons anymore (unless they still post on forums). It seems like a deliberate editorial decision. I would prefer to preserve the distinction, however, for reasons GP stated.

I use emoticons when texting (because I'm a graybeard), but my phone translates them into emojis before sending. So I've just taken to calling them all emojis.

My beard might be even greyer because I still think of them as 'smileys' :)

It took me years to change the habit of calling them smileys!

Do you mean you use smileys like :) :( :P ?

Emotions were the little images you could place amongst text in MSN Messenger.

As far as I recall it was pretty common to call :-) etc emoticons back in the day. Like 1990s/early 2000s.

Emoticons were originally and predominately text based ¯\_(-_-)_/¯

The author does state the distinction between emoji and emoticons in the sixth paragraph.

> I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically

Platforms like Slack and Mastodon now let you add what they call "custom emoji" which back in a web forum in 1999 we would have called "smilies", but in any case are definitely not part of unicode.

The term has evolved to just mean any graphical smilies/small embedded images

e-moji should be attributed to NTT DoCoMo, who first had it on their feature phones in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

The article above also noted how MSN Messenger and BlackBerry adopted emoji from 2003 onwards.

MSN Messenger never adopted emoji, they had their own emoticons/smilies that were developed independently. There were no emoji in the west until the iPhone got it in 2011

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...

I felt that it was on point to point out Microsoft, as it was the main area where I first started using emojis (before they were emojis, even though it was functionally the same). MSN Messenger came with a nice set of default smileys, and it was very simple to create your own smileys and use them in conversations with others. When other people sent a smiley to you, you could just right click it and add it to your own private repertoire of smileys.

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