Happy 25th Birthday, Smiley Face!

[mcscajun]

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley

Digital 'Smiley Face' Turns 25

PITTSBURGH (AP) — It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.

:-)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.

-snip-

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

-snip-

"I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea — it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."

-snip-

"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."

* Carnegie Mellon University's smiley page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5itl7xNHcrfXyPQvS9wv0S8x3rlKw

[Callalily]

1. Happy Birthday Smilies!

[mcscajun]

2. At least *someone* remembered.

:sniff: Poor little guys...no respect. :sniff:

:hi:

[WritingIsMyReligion]

3. Hey, who the hell needs to turn the head sideways to see it?

:rofl:

Happy Birthday, Smiley!