I too find this recollection suspect. IRC used sideways emoticons like :). I don’t think it even had Unicode until recently, and using anything other than ascii

I too find this recollection suspect. IRC used sideways emoticons like :). I don’t think it even had Unicode until recently, and using anything other than ascii has always been frowned upon. Sure, there were plenty of other types of ascii art, but shruggie is distinctly from the Unicode era.