Emoticon Celebrates 25th Birthday

The emoticon is celebrating its 25th birthday today, September 19th. The emoticon, the mish-mash of computer keyboard characters used to express "emotions" [like the smiley face :-) , which is a colon, dash, and right parentheses] was invented and first used by Carnegie Mellon University computer research professor Scott Fahlman. He first used the smiley face emoticon in a posting he contributed to an online bulletin board. Much to his surprise, his emotive little creation soon became popular with millions of computer users.

"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in ten minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman is quoted as saying in a Carnegie Mellon release. His reasoning for inventing the emoticon was to clarify for readers which postings were humorous or sarcastic versus those which were more earnest in nature. As Fahlman further explains in the Carnegie Mellon release, "the problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response."

To solve the problem, the creation of so-called "joke markers" were created, and Fahlman came up with the now-famous and widely used "smiley" emoticon, first presenting it to the Carnegie Mellon bulletin board community on September 19th, 1982.

Resource:

"Happy 25^th, Emoticon." Carnegie Mellon University. 19 September 2007. http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/beyond/2007/summer/happy-25th-emoticon.shtml