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I hate to be that guy, but the smiley/emoticon was invented on the PLATO platform circa 1972 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPjEJH0nhPoJ

I hate to be that guy, but the smiley/emoticon was invented on the PLATO platform circa 1972 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPjEJH0nhPoJ:www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-revisited.html&hl=en&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPjEJH... The CDC hardware platform didn't adapt to personal computing architectures, but many of the PLATO alumnus went on to futures with PARC and Apple.

wkat4242 3y ago
Link broken. But I read about Plato in that book the Happy Orange Glow or something like it. Didn't make it all the way through but it sounded groundbreaking
- hcs 3y ago
  The Friendly Orange Glow The author also had an article on PLATO emoticons as the book was in development: http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-revisited.html http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Ars did a really great overview of the system back in March. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/plato-how-an-educational-computer-system-from-the-60s-shaped-the-future/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/plato-how-an-educati... It's incredible what they got out of those CDC machines. I wish I had the EE skills to figure out how they did it. I suspect that the vacuum tubes might have yielded some compute capabilities far beyond transistors of the era, given the very high power levels you can get in tubes. But I don't know. It might just be very open-ended approaches to memory registers, or simply letting the plasma display do its own thing rather than wipe it back to its initial state.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
This is probably going to spark a dumb argument that's been done to death, but aren't emoticons typographical based? Those look like pictograms or arguably early emoji.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  They're actually overstrikes of existing characters! The PLATO terminal had some wack stuff built into it, courtesy, I suspect, of the vector buffers it was initially designed with. That kind of computational overhead limited the expansion of the system into commodity equipment, a definite cloud of doom. We can really, really go down the rabbit hole with encoding. Wireless morse had several equivalents to "emoticons" in its text encoding, and typesetters had zillions of different emoticons they could and did fabricate. Indeed, these are the first documented examples. PLATO is an oddball system, pre-ASCII, pre-everything. That overstrike trick kind of hints at that. So if we mean ASCII-encoded emotions, yeah, PLATO loses to CM's BBS circa 1982.

wkat4242 3y ago

Link broken. But I read about Plato in that book the Happy Orange Glow or something like it. Didn't make it all the way through but it sounded groundbreaking

hcs 3y ago
The Friendly Orange Glow The author also had an article on PLATO emoticons as the book was in development: http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-revisited.html http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Ars did a really great overview of the system back in March. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/plato-how-an-educational-computer-system-from-the-60s-shaped-the-future/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/plato-how-an-educati... It's incredible what they got out of those CDC machines. I wish I had the EE skills to figure out how they did it. I suspect that the vacuum tubes might have yielded some compute capabilities far beyond transistors of the era, given the very high power levels you can get in tubes. But I don't know. It might just be very open-ended approaches to memory registers, or simply letting the plasma display do its own thing rather than wipe it back to its initial state.

boomboomsubban 3y ago

This is probably going to spark a dumb argument that's been done to death, but aren't emoticons typographical based? Those look like pictograms or arguably early emoji.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
They're actually overstrikes of existing characters! The PLATO terminal had some wack stuff built into it, courtesy, I suspect, of the vector buffers it was initially designed with. That kind of computational overhead limited the expansion of the system into commodity equipment, a definite cloud of doom. We can really, really go down the rabbit hole with encoding. Wireless morse had several equivalents to "emoticons" in its text encoding, and typesetters had zillions of different emoticons they could and did fabricate. Indeed, these are the first documented examples. PLATO is an oddball system, pre-ASCII, pre-everything. That overstrike trick kind of hints at that. So if we mean ASCII-encoded emotions, yeah, PLATO loses to CM's BBS circa 1982.