View Single Post
Old 09-19-2002, 02:00 PM  
michaelw
Confirmed User
 
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Calgary, Canada
Posts: 1,342
:-)The World's first smiley
found this cool article via The Register and WMLAH.com.

The smiley :-) and its many variants are an important (and fun!) part of the worldwide online social culture -- allowing emotions to be conveyed in plain text. It has been in widespread use since the early '80s, when it was first proposed. Yet the original message in which the smiley was invented had been lost -- until now. :-) After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x). Here is Scott's original post:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(
__________________
<b><a href="http://www.hotlinkprotector.com"><font color="yellow">Hotlink Protector</font></a> - Protect all your file types from hotlinking the professional way. <br>
See a demo <a href="http://www.hotlinkprotector.com/demo.html"><font color="yellow">here</font></a>, and testimonials <a href="http://www.hotlinkprotector.com/testimonials.html"><font color="yellow">here</font></a><br>ICQ: 146423631
michaelw is offline   Share thread on Digg Share thread on Twitter Share thread on Reddit Share thread on Facebook Reply With Quote