The smiley emoticon is 25 years old!

Whatever you want to call it — smiley, emoticon, face, or whatever — there’s no doubt of the enormous impact that the simple creation of Scott Fahlman has on internet users today (and even SMS).

Back on September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman (and others) devised a way in which bulletin board users at Carnegie Mellon University could differentiate between serious posts and sarcastic posts (it was a big enough problem that they had to make up a set of “rules”).

Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). 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. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.

This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.

Man, if it weren’t for the smiley emoticon, I think communicating online with people would be a lot harder than it is. Even if I don’t necessarily use “:-)”, the variation that I do use — “:)” still has its roots back in 1982. Haha, that’s kinda funny…it’s older than me.

The original post by Scott Fahlman on September 19, 1982 can be read here.

And CMU has a page dedicated to the smiley emoticon.