Emoticons and Smileys on PLATO
13 September 2002 — The news is floating around the Web right now about the “discovery” of the first online emotion-conveying icon or “emoticon.” What readers and reporters are apparently not aware of is that the emoticon or “smiley” being discussed is the first ASCII smiley.
Like so many things, PLATO was doing emoticons and smileys, online and onscreen, years earlier. In fact, emoticons on PLATO were already an art form by 1976. PLATO users began doing smiley characters probably as early as 1972 (when PLATO IV came out), but possibly even earlier on PLATO III (still to be determined… old-timer PLATO III users please speak up!).
How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space — and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more — in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed “W” then SHIFT-space then “O” then SHIFT-space then “B”, “T”, “A”, “X”, all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the “WOBTAX” example.