It’s world emoji day, which makes today the perfect day to look back at retro emojis from the 80s and 90s. It might surprise you to hear we had emojis that long ago. We’ve had them since 1982, to be precise. The first known use was on a bulletin board by Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, on September 19, 1982. They didn’t stop there. Whether we called them emojis, emoticons, smileys, or just faces, they proliferated throughout online life in the 80s and 90s.
In my day, we didn’t have fancy graphics to make cute little smiley faces to let people know you were joking. We had the characters on a keyboard that you can type with a regular old typewriter. And we had to type them sideways. Only three people knew what all that gobbledygook was at the end of our sentences. Everyone else was afraid to ask. We just typed random stuff at the end of every sentence to fit in and instead we looked like idiots. Finally someone told us we were doing it wrong and told us we had to turn our head to see the :-). That’s the way it was, and we liked it. We loved it! — not Dana Carvey
If you’re old enough to remember comedian Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man routine on Saturday Night Live and you had a computer back then, you might have been an early adopter of emojis.
Emojis in the 80s
The 1980s emojis were pretty simple. A smile and a frown. In those days, all we had were text displays with around 128 symbols, including upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. So how did you draw a smiley face?
You turned it sideways. Using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis character in series, you could make a sideways smile or frown. It looked like this: 🙂 or 🙁
And it wasn’t long before someone thought to substitute a semicolon for the colon to make a winking face. Or they could substitute a capital letter D for for the parenthesis to make a big smile, or a capital letter P to make a face sticking its tongue out.
I thought I learned about emojis from an article in a magazine like RUN or Compute!’s Gazette, but I can’t find mention of them in either magazine now. It may have been an article in my local Commodore users’ group newsletter instead. Or maybe I’m using the wrong term, because we called them a lot of things besides emojis.
The earliest mention of smileys I could find was in a 1986 Amiga users group newsletter, which included a humorous anecdote about having to explain what they were. Smileys appeared even more frequently in print in the 90s, as modems became more common. Books about e-mail, the Internet in general, and even books about professional communication included a section on them. But again, they still called them a lot of different things.
I can vouch that the magazines weren’t making this up in the 80s. Wherever I went online in the ’80s, whether it was Quantumlink, CompuServe, or dialing into local bulletin board systems with a terminal program like Procomm Plus or dozens of similar programs for any platform, people were using emoticons. I never saw anyone have to explain them either. I seem to recall some boards having a primer that explained them, but seems like some people figured them out naturally on their own. Or maybe they asked in the chat rather than asking in the message board. But I can confirm people used them a lot.
Emojis today
Today, since we have graphical interfaces, we aren’t limited by the keyboard anymore. Today we probably have 10 or 12 smiley faces total, as opposed to 10 or 12 emojis total.
But you will find the old emojis still work in a lot of modern apps. If you type a 1980s-style sideways emoji, those apps will turn them into one of the graphical representations. That’s a convenience to people like me, who’ve been typing them this that way for more than 35 years. Except this one time as I’m trying to write a blog post about them. As I was writing this, it kept trying to turn my old school sideways emojis into modern graphical ones.
So hopefully this blog post is served as a bit of a trip down memory lane. Or, if you’ve read old Usenet messages and were wondering why sentences sometimes had 2-4 random characters at the end, but were afraid to ask, that’s what they were. Late 20th century emojis.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.