I would guess chat rooms. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has a command where you can say that you do something instead of say something. You’d type “/me waves!” and it would put “BigT waves,” in a different color/font than normal speech if available.
I would guess that, as people started chatting elsewhere, they came up with the ~waves~ or waves notation. And of course that will spread to forums.
I know the commonly accepted origin of that is mIRC, but I’m 95% sure that I think I remember recalling* that it was built into the software of a small dialup BBS chatroom I used to frequent.
(Hey, those memories are hazy, what can I say…)THANK YOU for this link! I’d heard the “Niagara Falls…Slowly I turned…” memes, but I’d never gotten a full context. I had started to think it was a joke that didn’t actually have a meaning, but was just funny for people who knew about it.
(“No soap…radio!”)
This got me wandering around some cobwebs as well. I remember stage directions being fairly common in the AOL Chat Rooms mid-90s once we went to monthly fees. And as those broke down and boards became more prevalent the habit carrying over to there. But which chicken or which egg came first I don’t recall. It does seem to have died away in favor of standardized “Smilies” like we have. :smack:
Yeah, they’re not stage directions, they’re emotes. That’s both the name for the preprogrammed ones and the command which in many chats and games will let you make up your own.
exits stage left, pursued by a bear
Swampy! Leave Kobal2 be!
I remember them when I first started using BBSs, which would have been around 1984.