Friday, September 19, 2008

Happy Anniversary Emoticon

Ouch, that's how you know you're getting old...
Our popular ASCII smiley is 26 years old today.

It was 26 years ago, on  Septmeber 19th 1982 (yep, we already had computers back then :P) that Scott Fahlman posted the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

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:

:-(

And so emoticons were born...

(And you may want to learn some secret emoticons to use on Gmail's chat.)

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