Someone accidentally wrote 8088 machine code using nothing but emoji

This article was featured in the August 14, 2026, edition of the IBM Think newsletter. Get it in your inbox.

🐸☺️🐰🐎♐🗃️🧯🧯🧯🐮💗🦮🪏♐🐰🐹🗃️🧯🧯🧯🧯💗🪗🧯😗🧮🫪😗🧮😗🐮😪😔⭐

When you see this string of seemingly random emojis, what are your first thoughts? A cryptic message? A spy transmission? Maybe your toddler hijacked your phone?  Perhaps! But as one retro computing enthusiast recently discovered, it could also be a computer program.

Recently, GitHub user dbalsom, who runs the blog Adventures in PC Emulation, built a web-based x86 disassembler (a tool that translates raw machine code back into readable instructions) as a side project. While testing it out, he noticed something odd: pasting a goat emoji (🐐) into the tool encoded it as “F0 9F 90 90”—hexadecimal that just happens to double as valid instructions for the 8088, the chip that powered the original IBM PC back in 1981. This caught our eye, of course, since we’re big fans of goats here at IBM.

Let’s back up for a sec. Every character you type on a computer, whether it is letters or numbers or (yes) emojis, gets stored as a sequence of numbers, or bytes, under the hood. That’s how computers encode text (specifically UTF-8 for most modern text).

Anyway, back to the goat. After realizing the entire goat emoji is valid 8088 machine code (specifically “F0 9F 90 90”), “A dim little light bulb started to flicker above my head,” dbalsom wrote. “Could you actually write an 8088 program using nothing but displayable emoji?”

It turns out the goat wasn’t a fluke. Most emojis start with the same “F0 9F” byte sequence, giving dbalsom a surprisingly large collection of characters to work with. So he started stringing them together to build actual working programs. The emojis you see at the top of this article, for example, will print “HELLO” (short for “Hello, world”). But why stop there? Next up, he built a full graphics demo—hundreds of emojis long—that runs in DOSBox, a DOS emulator.

None of this is useful! It’s a party trick (a rather nerdy one), but it’s also fun to know that whatever a long string of emojis means to you means something entirely different to a processor from the Reagan administration.

“Could you construct an emoji BIOS?” dbalsom wrote. “An entire emoji operating system? Could we have EmojiDOOM?” 

Hey, who needs Rust when you’ve got an accordion and a fire extinguisher? A running list of executable Unicode is already growing on GitHub if you want to check out more.