Martin Edwards
@medwds@infosec.exchange
Computer technician and village newsletter editor in Oxfordshire, UK. Passionate about cyber security, electronic music, wildlife and pet rats. 
infosec.exchange
17 July is the one day of the year when the calendar #emoji is correct!
The word emoji combines the Japanese e (絵, picture) + moji (文字, character) and dates back to the late 80s. Its similarity to the English "emotion" is just a coincidence.
Nowadays, emoji are standardised by the Unicode Consortium, a Californian non-profit that has its roots in facilitating a universal digital representation of the world's writing systems. #Unicode doesn't specify exactly how emoji should look – so they're different on Android and Apple devices, for example – but it lists their names.
The first major character set used in computing was #ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, published in 1963. Using 7 bits, it could represent 128 characters — more than enough for a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9 and common punctuation marks, but certainly indicative of a North American worldview.
Later "extended" versions of ASCII doubled this to 256 possibilities, allowing for dozens of accented letters, characters like æ and ß, and symbols like © and ¾. And double-byte character sets like Shift JIS meant that Chinese, Korean and Japanese could be represented in full. But multiple standards existed, and it became just a bit too common to see ����.
The answer was Unicode: a single, multi-byte character encoding standard for everyone. Plus emoji!
#language #i18n
