Smile! The Emoticon Celebrates 32th Anniversary Today!

[Nawreez]

SMILE everyone because today is Friday! Now if that sentence was written via your mobile phone, most probably there will be the emoticon :-) at the end of that sentence. Well guess what, today that smiley emoticon turns 32-years old!
Over the past decade or so, smileys and emoticons have gained massive popularity over the internet and mobile texting. It has become second nature and a standard way of communicating. There is no clear date as to when the first emoticon was used, and it is also not clear who really invented it. However it is generally accepted that the common sideways smiley face (the symbol :-) used today) was the brainchild of a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman.
Fahlman suggested the use of emoticons because he thought it would help people on a message board at Carnegie Mellon University to distinguish serious posts from jokes. The original message from which these symbols originated was posted on September 19, 1982. The message was recovered by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002 and is quoted:

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

:-(

Nowadays, there are thousands of different emoticons in use. But to Scott Fahlman, we take-off our hats and say ‘thank you’. Or in more simple terms, we’ll just type :-)


- mD