Now there was another main predecessor to the emoji - this was designed by a man called Scott Fahlman, in the 1980s, who suggested that certain characters used in the ASCII language that was used by computers could be made to look like pictures. "ASCII", by the way, is an acronym for `American Standard Code for Information Interchange`.
His first two designs were a smiling face and a frowning face - and these were comprised of a full colon for the eyes, a dash for the nose, and either of the parentheses for the mouth. In case you are confused, the face was designed to be viewed sideways - as :
:-) - or - :-(
Now when the typewriter was invented in 1866, it had just twenty eight keys, and you could have made the eyes with a colon, and the nose with a dash, but not the mouth, unless you used the capital letter I, which, curiously, also served for a number one, because the numeral keys only started with the number two. Likewise the capital letter O was also used for a zero. The semi-colon, the one with the comma not the two dots was also a later arrival, to get one you would have to back space and type a comma on top of the colon.
The first time that these rounded parentheses appeared on a typewriter seems to have been in the 1930s - which is slightly later than our card. They were above numbers 8 and 9 and they were accessed by pressing the shift key at the same time, much as we do today on our computers. However my chromebook has them above numbers 9 and 0.
Parentheses ( ) were added to the English language much later than chevrons < > and than square brackets [ ] - which are also known as "lunula" because they are the shape of the moon when it is a crescent. However parentheses were first to appear on keyboards. It seems that this was because they alone had a mathematical function which was used in business. The other sort of bracket, { } was not added to computer keyboards until the 1960s - and some people used those in their sideways face to show the speaker was female rather than male. And it seems that ASCII was the first typed language to have all these symbols on it.
This card is one of those lovely little thin, almost paper ones, which I am very keen on. This one shows a lady typist at a factory, see the chimneys behind her out of the window, and though she is facing away from it, glued to her work, she probably considered herself to be very lucky indeed to have such a job, and we know that in the 1920s typists were quite sought after as they were replacing the men who were lost to the office during, and because of the First World War. In America a typist could earn twenty dollars a week - and though this was at least ten to fifteen dollars less than her male equivalent, it was double that of many trades.
This actual set is called "Les Ecritures", which means "The Writings" but simply shows the story of writing through the ages starting with the countries who developed the languages we use today, and then showing how writing developed. A full set comprises :
- Russe - Russian, but possibly meaning Cyrillic
- Assyrienne - Assyrian
- Latine - Latin
- Phenicienne - Phoenician
- Hebraique - Hebrew
- Chinoise - Chinese
- Arabe - Arabic
- Les Manuscrits au Moyen-Ages - Hand lettering during the Middle Ages
- Les caracteres d`imprimerie a la Renaissance - printing during the Renaissance
- Les Heiroglyphs chez les Egyptiennes - Heiroglyphics at the home of the Egyptians
- Les Tablettes Romaines - Roman Tablets
- La Machine A Ecrire Moderne - A modern typewriter