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I'm pretty sure the yellow colour for emoji was chosen by NTT in Japan

I remember ICQ and early forum software with yellow smiles (emoji was not a word yet). First NTT eonji set is 1999 according to Wikipedia, and ICQ is 1996-1998 (I'm not sure, that first version contains graphical smiles, but 1998 one for sure had ones).

Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.

I remember thinking emoji are cheating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unicode is absolutely cheating. ;) :P

> […] I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.

What I don't like is when software/services try to be 'clever' / 'helpful' and 'translate' ASCII smileys into emojis. At this point I have to `backtick` sometimes to keep them as-is.

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