[benj111]

Well this was in real life, so you aren't going to get records.

Wikipedia suggests lol is more like 40 years old, but you actually have a written record to back that up.

All I have is my own experience, I wasn't really on the internet until the 2000s so I wouldn't have come across lol until mobile phones and texting became widespread (around 1999/2000).

"I accidentally a" would have been in the 1995 - 2000 time frame. But again that's just my experience of it.

[Izkata]

Knowyourmeme has a confirmed usage of "lol" from 1989, along with a list of others from the same document: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lol

"I accidentally" started in 2008, and they have a link to the youtube video it came from: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-accidentally

[seanhunter]

Yeah LOL comes from the BBS days as do a bunch of other acronyms/initialisms https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/05/lol-s-25th-annivers...

[pohl]

I’ll stand as witness to the fact that ordinary people playfully tortured the language towards humorously cute long, long before one TRS-80 could call another over the phone. The tech just helped these people find and feed off of each other.

[zem]

look up the (speculative) etymology of OK for instance