October 8, 2011

"I received a text on my iPhone on the morning of October 6 that said, 'ᎣᏏᏲ, ᎩᎾᎵ.'"

"It’s a simple Cherokee greeting, akin to “Hello, friend” in English.  It’s pronounced 'oh-see-yo, gee-na-lee.'  It may not seem like much to the casual observer that has been sending and receiving texts for years, but seeing the Cherokee syllabary appear in that tiny bubble on my screen is a profound thing.  And I have Steve Jobs to thank for it."

Writes Roy Boney Jr.

18 comments:

xnar said...

Seeing those alien symbols in the title of an Althouse post is also a profound thing.

Moose said...

*groan*

This is getting pathetic.

Fred4Pres said...

I guess we can thank Reed College for that.

BTW it's motto is "workers of the world unite." Reed was founded with timber money but the first students there adopted that phrase.

Unknown said...

I didn't know Jobs made that font.

I've made nine, why don't I get kudus? This is already pathetic.

Fred4Pres said...

BTW in case you missed it Steve Jobs went to Reed for a semester and took a course on fonts and progressive type.

mariner said...

Fred4Pres,

I've only had one cup of coffee.

Is "progressive type" a political comment or is it a stand-in for "proportional type"?

rhhardin said...

It displays hexadecimal blocks in Firefox, the browser of cowboys.

Not enough wampum has passed hands.

MaggotAtBroad&Wall said...

Steve Wozniak "invented" the Apple 1. And by invented I mean he took all the parts already commercially available and assembled them. Then he and Jobs turned their hobby of tinkering in the garage into a business, they created a "closed" operating system which shut them out of 95% of the market after IBM/MSFT decided to compete against them.

The i-pod was not the first MP3 player invented. Jobs did not invent the celluar phone. He did not invent the tablet PC. And when Appple comes out with the i-TV, it will be an improvement on already existing technology.

G Joubert said...

It wasn't fonts back then. It was calligraphy.

Astro said...

@ MaggotAtBroad&amp

Furthermore, SRI and Xerox PARC invented and developed the graphical user interface and the rolling ball mouse that Apple 'stole' to use for the MAC which made it so unique and user friendly. -- Which Jobs then had the temerity to claim MS 'stole' from Apple.

Curious George said...

"Astro said...
Which Jobs then had the temerity to claim MS 'stole' from Apple."

No he didn't. He was just joking. Althouse said so. She could hear the comedy in his printed word. Plus her son said so.

Leland said...

If you say so

Jose_K said...

Wrong
Why IP is limited in the case of patents? Because, soon or later someone would come with the same.Without Shakesperare we would have Amlet prince of Jutland but no Hamlet. Without Guttemberg there was press and we would have movile types press.

Glenn Howes said...

The reason computers are able to represent text from such obscure character sets as Cherokee is the existence of the Unicode standard which was invented and promoted through the standard process by Apple. If it wasn't for Unicode we'd still be dealing with 256 character code pages and we'd be lucky if we could represent the Euro symbol when e-mailing from one computer to another.

sorepaw said...

The development of the Cherokee syllabary was a significant achievement.

Why run it down?

Or run down Steve Jobs for promoting Unicode?

Simon Hawkin said...

"And I have Steve Jobs to thank for it"

Oh, really? Jobs is dead, but the reality distortion lives on.

Luttapi Kuttoossan said...

Is your iphone an unlocked cell phone ? Else your carrier has enslaved you and is sending the message :-)

Anonymous said...

it was awesome!!



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