Jason LefkowitzI don’t use em dashes because I’m an AI. I use em dashes because I’m pretentious
Bradley M. Kuhn@jalefkowit I was so glad when — was a supported Unicode character everywhere.
Jens Finkhäuser@bkuhn @jalefkowit As a LaTeX snob, I used em-dashes way before they were cool.
Ok, @jens, I couldn't resist showing off (… both my advanced age & geek cred). I did successive `find`s w/ older & older `-mtime`s. I found my oldest record of using LaTeX's ‘---’ command to yield ‘—’. Turns out, I first did it on 1993-04-06 at 13:28 US/Eastern, in a paper for a literature class about _Waiting for Godot_.
I realize LaTeX reserved single ‘-’ for a hyphen, but I remember @karen when I first met her asking my WTF I used *3* (& not *2*) ‘-’'s for ‘—’ in emails.
Cc: @jalefkowit
I don't think I have records *quite* that old of using LaTeX, but it wouldn't be much younger. I can easily reconstruct that I switched to the unstable 1.3 series of Linux for a while, because 2.0 took so damn long, but before that I have no clear memory of kernel versions. That puts me in between '96 (2.0) and around '92 when the 486DX2/66 came out that I first ran Linux on <insert anecdote about Quake>.
It was in that period that I discovered LaTeX.