https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akvqgk/why-we-use-lol-so-much > In the 1980s in Canada, Wayne Pearson laughed at a joke his friend typed into an pre-Internet digital chat room called Viewline. “It had me bursting out laughing almost to the embarrassment of doing so in a house by myself sitting at a computer,” Pearson told the Calgary Herald in 2015. > Instead of writing “hahaha,” as he had done before when he found something funny, Pearson unknowingly made history by typing “LOL,” becoming—apparently—the very person to do so.