What nation do you think emoticons and text acronyms came from?

My best guess is here in America since the first recorded emoticons were from Americans but text acronyms confuse me because when I was talking to a friend in Germany and said gtg she told me that they have something over there that is llgt which all the words are in German and not English and it is some way of saying goodbye for a while. Where do you think the first ones came from?|||I am from germany and we basically just adopted the emotions from the USA. only ghetto kids use german acronyms..