Re:Why the Emoji Was Inevitable (2017)
by blululu on Monday September 02, 2019 @12:45PM
(#20860250)
In retrospect anything is inevitable.
Without Apple trying to sell phones in Japan on Softbank’s network on an OS built to play mp3s it seems unlikely that people would have hacked the Unicode spec to draw smiley faces.
That said rich text is the future - hence html.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Emojis far predated the iphone, much less its introduction in Japan, hence the global use of the Japanese term.
As for the Unicode issue: each phone network (and some of the pre-phone Japanese computers) used different code points and had different sets of emojis.
Also is iOS really "an OS designed to play mp3s?" it isn't the iPod's simple OS and really was a version of OS X.