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It was extremely frequently used on IRC back then

Emojis as well, though they were pure ASCII, not the emoticons of today

the ASCII faces are the emoticons, emoji means "picture character" and includes all the UTF8 cartoons.

both terms were coined after UTF-8 and after people started to replace the character strings like :) with pictures.

emojis are technically the UTF-8 style emoticons, so you do have a point that i shouldn't call ascii style emoticons this, but its really a redundant distinction in my opinion. Especially as the term emoticon also applies to emojis/picture representations of ascii-style emoticons.

Unicode indeed has an emoticon block (referring to emojis with facial expression) but the term actually predates the very UTF-8 itself going back to early 80s. Emoji also predates its Unicode introduction originating from Japan in late 90s.

what source do you have that the term 'emoticon' was coined in the 80th?

As far as I know, the term was coined in the 90th. Please take note that i've - from the start, talked about the term, not the usage of punctuation to show faces

Here's a reference to the term from 1987:

https://archive.org/details/ParalanguageInElectronicMail-ACa...

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