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Emoji – older than you think

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It might just be random 17th Century punctuation, but this poem from 1648 certainly seems to be using a smiley face emoji.
(OK, it’s probably not intentional, but it’s lovely intersection of the emoji and the word.)

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thirty.years.com

Thirty years ago this Sunday, symbolics.com was registered – the first .com domain. It was followed, within a few months, by bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com and dec.com.
Symbolics made lisp machines – symbolics.com is now owned by a domain speculator.
BBN is a technology R&D company who’ve worked on everything. If I had to pick one thing they were involved with it’d be the Internet Message Processor – the router used on the very first Internet nodes. They are still around, as a division of Raytheon.
Think.com made some amazing massively parallel computers. Their hardware group was bought out by Sun, who were bought out by Oracle and think.com now redirects to a broken error page at oracle.com.
Mcc.com were the first – and for a while, the largest – computing research and development consortium in the US. They did groundbreaking work on everything from silicon to AI. Their domain is now a generic parked page owned by a domain speculator.
Dec.com were Digital Equipment Corporation – creators of the PDP, VAX, Alpha and StrongARM processors, amongst many other things. They were a huge company when I worked for them designing Alpha CPUs in the mid 90s, then they were acquired by Compaq, then HP, then split up. Their domain is now a personal website.
It took nearly three years to reach 100 registered .com domains and nearly 10 years to reach 9,000.
As of this morning there are 116,621,517 domains registered in .com, from (64 zeros).com to (64 letter z).com, out of a possible total of more than two googol – so there’s still a domain there for you.
221,848 of those domains in .com mention “mail”.

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Email saves trees!

The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp rather than the fancy new web browser called NCSA Mosaic. To share pictures we actually had to send printouts by postal mail.
It wasn’t just getting spam that was memorable (oh, great! now my inbox is going to look like my postal box, stuffed full of things I don’t want), it was the domain name: savetrees.com. Built into the domain name was an entire argument defending spam on the grounds of environmental friendliness. By sending spam instead of postal mail we could save the earth. Anyone who didn’t like it was morally corrupt and must hate the planet.
Why do I mention this history? During a discussion on a list for marketers earlier this week, multiple people mentioned that email marketing was clearly and obviously the much more environmentally sound way to do things. I mentioned this over on Facebook and one of my librarian friends (who was one of the people I was email friends with back in those early days) started doing her thing.
She posted her findings over on the Environmental News Bits blog: The comparative environmental impact of email and paper mail. It’s well worth a read, if only because a lot of companies have really looked into the issue in great detail. Much greater detail than I thought was being put into the issue.
I shared one of the links she found, the 2009 McAfee study, with the email marketing group discussing the issue. (You may want to put down the drinks before reading the next line.) It was universally panned as marketing and therefore the conclusions couldn’t be trusted.
Anyone who pays any attention knows that nothing we do and none of the choices we make are environmentally neutral. Plastic bags were supposed to save trees from becoming paper bags, but turned into an environmental mess of their own.
Simple slogans like “email saves trees” might make marketers feel better, and may have gained Cyberpromo a strong customer base in the early days. But the reality is different.

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