Emoji History: The Missing Years

Emoji History: The Missing Years ♥
==================================
2024-05-12
by @gingerbeardman

During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came
across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo
functions. I bought a couple of them to see if they did anything cool
or interesting. These sorts of devices are pre-internet, so there's
no much about them online, and they can't be emulated, so the only
way to find out what they do is to get first hand experience by
reading the manual or, better, using one yourself. It's difficult to
find these devices in working condition, as most of them have screen
polarisers that have gone bad over time, but if you're lucky you can
find one.

<https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/10/21/
list-of-vintage-japanese-pixel-dot-art-software/>

1994
====
One such device I bought was the Sharp PI-4000, from 1994. This is a
pocket computer that rolled out of Sharp's involvement in the
development and manufacturing of Apple's Newton MessagePad. In 1993
Sharp did their own licenced version of the Apple Newton MessagePad
H1000, the Expert Pad PI-7000, but just like Apple's device it wasn't
as successful as they'd hoped. But before that, in 1992, they'd made
a device called the PV-F1 which was the first touchscreen-only PDA.
After the Expert Pad failure, Sharp took another attempt at the
concept and came up with the PI-3000 in 1993. This solved all the
problems with the PV-F1, most notably size and cost. The device I
have, the PI-4000, was released a year later and features higher
memory capacity. The PI-3000/4000 devices could transfer data via
infrared, connect to a modem to send faxes, and by the PI-5000 in
1995 could connect to cell phones to send emails. They all use a
simplified—but still quite complicated—version of the multi-window
operating system that had been developed for the PV-F1.

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-sharp-pi-3000.jpg>

<https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/MessagePad_H1000>

<https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Sharp_Expert_Pad_PI-7000>

Sharp Zaurus PI-3000 "Personal Information Tool" (1993)
=======================================================
So I was trying out the PI-4000, the memo function is pretty cool
allowing you to draw in different dither shades and pen widths, and
use stamps to add symbols to your memo. These are mostly map-related
things like road and rail junctions, buildings, and train stations.
Pretty cool. Then I tried typing some messages on the device and as I
explored the myriad of keyboard input mechanisms I came across
something rather familiar (sorry about the awful photo—it's the best
I could do, honest—the screen is very reflective and the pixels are
so far from the backing they cast individual shadows!):

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-sharp-pi-4000-emoji-picker.jpg>

Look! It's an emoji picker on the Sharp PI-4000 (1994)

At this point, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing because I
was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an
anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji
were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp
PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of
recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell.

<https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1997>

<https://emojipedia.org/docomo/1999>

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-sharp-pi-4000-emoji-table-16-16.png>

Emoji present on the Sharp PI-4000 (1994)

1991
====
A little more reading, and a tip from my friend @chamekan on Twitter,
unearthed the fact that the NEC PI-ET1 in 1991 also contained emoji.
The device is literally the coolest thing you've ever seen. With
system software written by video game developer Hudson Soft its
character set features emoji that can be typed inline, and it also
features a "montage function" that allows you to create faces for
each of your contacts--15 years later we'd see something similar in
Mii on Nintendo Wii in 2006. The emoji on this device are a lot less
well designed, in my humble opinion, than those on the Sharp devices.

<https://twitter.com/chame>

<https://youtu.be/8_w8elG3w0Y?t=248>

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-nec-pi-et1-emoji-table-20-20.png>

Emoji present on the NEC PI-ET1 (1991)

A word about word processors
============================
By now I was in contact with Keith at Emojipedia, who mentioned that
he remembered a Sharp device with emoji, a word processor. I found
one in the Sharp WD-A521, from November 1990, which featured higher
resolution versions of the emoji designs found on my Sharp PI-4000.

<https://emojipedia.org/>

<http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/Emoji/
SHARP-WD-A521p457-458.pdf>

Perhaps there are other word processors from around that time that
also contain emoji? I understand from my friend Izumi Okano that
Japanese software developer Enzan-Hoshigumi, most famous for their
Macintosh software and clipart, had created pictograms for one of the
Canoword word processors around 1986. So at this point I'm thinking,
why would the emoji on a word processor be ignored on the timeline of
emoji history? Was there anything else being ignored?

<https://twitter.com/haeckel>

<https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/12/16/
tomoya-ikeda-macintosh-artist/>

Before cell phones became prevalent there were pagers, or beepers, in
Japan these were known as Pocket Bell. Initially they would only beep
and show a number, and people would use "beeper slang" to form words
by using numbers whose pronunciation was similar to words and
syllables. Necessity is the mother of invention! Eventually pagers
would be able to send and receive text. It was perhaps only natural
that emoji find a home on these devices, with the most notable being
the heart ❤️ emoji. But the date of this transition is 1995, which is
earlier than the SoftBank emoji from 1997 but later than my Sharp
PI-4000 device.

<https://twitter.com/s7ephenwithaph/status/1785939813432254950>

A note about beepers
====================
As an aside, it's interesting to understand how emoji were typed on
pagers/beepers. They weren't selected using a picker, which would
have required cycling through a huge range of characters, but rather
typed in numeric digits which narrows the cycling down to far less
characters.

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-pocket-bell-pager.jpg>

Pager cheat sheet

<https://ima.goo.ne.jp/column/article/6981.html>

The numeric code: 21 91 15 24 12 23 78
... would map to: カラオケイク？
... which means: KARAOKE?

Wild. Typing text this way must have felt like programming machine
code directly in hexadecimal!

What makes it emoji?
====================
I was chatting to my friend Louie Mantia, who has designed many emoji
in his career, discussing the earlier emoji I had found in my 1994
device. Louie asked me to confirm that I could type emoji inline with
text, giving me the example W😲W, which was his criteria for the
symbols to qualify as emoji. If I couldn't do that, he suggested we
could only consider the symbols as icons.

<https://lmnt.me/blog/>

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-sharp-pi-4000-emoji-wow.jpg>

Passing the Emoji test on the Sharp PI-4000

So if I can type them inline amongst text on my device from 1994 that
was capable of connecting to other devices and sending messages, then
surely they should be considered the first emoji? Why do we,
currently, only count emoji as emoji if they're on a mobile phone?
I'm also wondering when these emoji might have been designed. Were
they created in 1994 for the PI-4000, in 1993 for the PI-3000, or
earlier for another device?

1988
====
So I kept looking. I was aware of another line of Sharp devices,
electronic organisers, known as the Bware range in Japan and Wizard
in the USA. These were pretty popular at the time, so much so that
the USA device even got it's own episode of Seinfeld in 1998. I'd
come back into contact with these devices just last year as they had
the interesting capability of being able to play video games stored
on solid-state application "IC" cards. You can play a version of
Tetris by BPS that is quite different to the Game Boy version, and
both were released in 1989. You can also play versions of Sokoban by
Thinking Rabbit, and Fortress by SSI/Victor, amongst others.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_(Seinfeld)>

<https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/
stay-sharp-with-sc-denshi-system-techo-games/2326>

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-sharp-pa-8500-1988.jpg>

Thanks to a collector, Akuji, I was able to confirm that the Japanese
PA-8500 device, released in 1988, contains emoji similar in design to
those found on my PI-4000 and on the WD-A521. When redrawing these it
was obvious that all the Sharp emoji sets are based on the same
master design. (I'd love to know more about the Sharp artwork if
anybody knows anything.)

<https://www.reddit.com/r/OldHandhelds/comments/sr51ze/
may_i_present_you_the_whole_family_of_sharp/>

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-sharp-pa-8500-emoji-table-20-20.png>

Emoji present on Sharp PA-8500 (1988)

How old is an emoji?
====================
At this point we've wiped almost a decade off the creation date of
emoji, but can we go further? Is there a way to date a set of emoji?

If we think about the PA line of devices, the PA-8500 was released in
1988, and it's predecessor the (emoji-less) PA-7000 was released in
1987. So maybe the emoji set was created around this time? We can get
closer by looking at a couple of characters present in the emoji that
give us a clue to the date of creation. That is indeed the case with
the Sharp PI-4000 and WD-A521.

The characters ○金 and ○ビ (maru-kin meaning rich/successful/winner and
maru-bi meaning poor/unsuccessful/loser) were invented by the author
Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan which was later made
into a movie. These were quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary,
and they won 84年の日本流行語 (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984). And they are
right there in the Sharp PI-4000 emoji, represented as characters
enclosed in circles. They were in common use throughout Japan's
bubble-era, 1986-1991. The words eventually fell out of fashion and
are now considered obsolete. It's interesting to note that they are
not featured in either the 1997 SoftBank or 1999 NTT DoCoMo emoji sets.

<https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A1%E8%BE%BA%E5%92%8C%E5%8D%9A
#%E2%97%8B%E9%87%91%E3%83%BB%E2%97%8B%E3%83%93>

<https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html>

<https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1997>

<https://emojipedia.org/docomo/1999>

1984
====
Once you accept that emoji existed in the 1980s, more things come to
light. The Ishii Award 「石井賞創作タイプフェイスコンテスト」
was a typeface design contest organised by the community of type
designers in 1970. By 1984 it was in its 8th year. Yutaka Satoh of
Type-Labo proposed a typeface consisting of emoji. Because they
weren't on screen they were created by arranging dots in various
shapes, but they are recognisably emoji.

<https://news.mynavi.jp/article/font-history-19/>

Coincidentally, I used a hybrid of this sort of approach when I
added emoji to my game YOYOZO in September 2023: I plot the emoji
as points but define them on a pixel grid.

<https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/
emoji-history-type-labo-typeface-1984.jpg>

Yakumono typeface (partial/proposed),
created by Yutaka Satoh (TYPE-LABO) in 1984

In Matt Alt's book "The Secret Lives of Emoji: How Emoticons
Conquered the World", there is a brief mention of ASCII emoticons on
the Japanese internet (JUNET) in 1984, and then it fast forwards to
1995 to begin talking about the Pager, missing a decade of emoji
usage in the process.

<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30631850-the-secret-lives-of-emoji>

In the Yakumono typeface, created by Yutaka Satoh (TYPE-LABO), we can
clearly see many of the key emoji that would persist throughout the
years: smiley faces, food, drink, cigarettes, sweat, umbrella,
paperclip, lips, envelope, and most interestingly the (not smiling)
pile of poo. This typeface received an honourable mention at the
awards. Some 40 years later, I think it's safe to say it deserved
more.

<https://www.type-labo.jp/Ohbun.html>

1979
====
We can see emoji in the character sets of Japanese home computers
such as the Sharp MZ-80K, which included a UFO, smiley faces, stick
figures, car, snake, and more. I won't include them here but you can
click the above link to see some in a PDF.

<http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/JUGYO/2009-12-21.pdf>

1965
====
"Full Moon With Face", also known as BA-90 which was listed in a book
of typesetting symbols, published by Sha-ken in 1965. A smiling moon
is still present in the emoji set today. 🌝

<https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/BA-90>

<https://emojipedia.org/full-moon-face>

image courtesy of Wikimedia

1959
====
CO-59 is a character set created in 1959 for exchange of data between
Japanese newspapers. In it is included a symbol of a baseball, which
again is still present in emoji and at Unicode codepoint U+26BE today.

<https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO-59>

<https://emojipedia.org/baseball>

<https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26be/index.htm>

<http://etlcdb.db.aist.go.jp/etlcdb/>

image courtesy of ETL character database

Comparing Emoji
===============
I was interested in how the emoji that I have redrawn compared to the
1997 SoftBank and 1999 DoCoMo sets, and an early Pocket Bell, so
here's a little table.

                SHARP    NEC     SHARP  P BELL  SOFT   NTT
                PA-8500  PI-ET1  PI-4k  R-FAHC  BANK   DOCOMO
                -------  ------  -----  ------  ----   ------
    Year        1988     1991    1994   1995    1997   1999
    Quantity    100      130     170    7       90     176
    Resolution  16×16    16×16   12×12  5×7     12×12  12×12

Conclusion
==========
So what does this all mean? I'd say mostly that the history emoji
isn't as clean cut as you might have thought. You can decide for
yourself on what you consider to be the first emoji. It depends on
our own personal definition, so there is no right or wrong answer.

Personally, I define the start date of emoji as the point in time
when sets of these symbols first appeared for use whilst composing
text. I don't think the timeline should start at mobile phones, as
this feels like a somewhat arbitrary decision that dismisses a lot of
history. It's like saying music only began to exist from the moment
it could be recorded and listened to without the actual muscians
being present.

As to whether the timeline of emoji history will be rewritten with
this knowledge, it's difficult to say. Much of this falls in the grey
area of happening around the time the internet was taking hold, plus
most things about the origin of emoji are in Japanese language, so
there are unlikely to be sources Wikipedia would consider verifiable
enough. The best we could do is quote the pages of the manuals for
devices, and for the rest hope that there's some record in Japanese
literature that could be cited.

I won't be running the Wikipedia editing gauntlet, but if you do
please let me know how it goes!

From: <https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/05/10/
emoji-history-the-missing-years/>