Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
>
>>I don't know what mojibake is (it would be nice if it's like a
>>clambake), but all I see at the top of his posting is a
>>random-appearing string of ASCII characters.
>>
>>
>
>And that's exactly what IT people call "mojibake" (BTW, they are *non*-ASCII
>characters, to be precise).
>
>I guess the humorous term was invented by some exasperated Japanese computer
>engineer. AFAIK, it means something like "scrambled characters" or "soup of
>characters".
>
>

I've only heard of this relatively recently (though before this
particular conversation). What's known about the origin of the word?
Where did it start showing up first? And is it /modʒɪbeɪk/ or /modʒɪbake/?

~mark