The Missing Years in Emoji History ⇥ blog.gingerbeardman.com
At this point, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell. 🕳️🐇
This article may start with this discovery from 1994, but it absolutely does not end there. What a fascinating piece of well-documented and deeply researched history.