A Brief History Of Smiley's

The very first emoticon possibly appeared in 1979, first used by someone named Kevin Mackenzie. He is believed to have first used the  -) symbol, which meant "tongue in cheek". The technique didn't appear to catch on, and it remained for another to start the fad.

Between 1981 and mid-1982, emoticons are believed to have been invented (or at least they took hold of the popular imagination) by Scott Fahlman on the CMU bulletin board system. This board was similar in concept to today's newsgroups or message boards, and was intended as a place for people to chat and have discussions. Scott noticed a problem on the board: people would post a humorous comment, but others would not get the joke. This led to countless flames and meaningless discussions.

Scott suggested the use of :-) to show pleasure (or indicate a joke) and :-( to show displeasure. This usage caught on like wildfire all over the place, and before long you could see this usage everywhere.

Scott later wrote: "Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of the original post.  It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.  By the time I realized that this smiley-face phenomenon was going to be long-lasting and that it would spread around the world as the Internet grew, it was too late to retrieve the post."

The post was eventually recovered from a backup tape.

17-Sep-82 10:58 Neil Swartz at CMU-750R Elevator posts Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke.

17-Sep-82 14:59 Joseph Ginder at CMU-10A (*%) I believe that the joke character should be % rather than *.

17-Sep-82 15:15 Anthony Stentz at CMU-780G (*%) How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes? We could even use *% for jokes that are so bad, they're funny.

17-Sep-82 17:40 Keith Wright at CMU-10A *%&#$ Jokes! No, no, no! Surely everyone will agree that "&" is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter). It sounds funny (say it loud and fast three times). I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum of the CRT it would even smell funny!

17-Sep-82 17:42 Leonard Hamey at CMU-10A {#} (previously *) ...I think that the joke character should be the sequence {#} because it looks like two lips with teeth showing between them. This is the expected result if someone actually laughs their head off...

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 :-(

Before long, dozens, hundreds and perhaps thousands of variations appeared, showing every possible emotion, concept, idea and even personalities. 

These textual elements have come to be called emoticons, which is short for emotive icons.

Additional Information

• Smiley's - Another list of smiley's and emoticons.

Nerdtimes.com © 2003 Richard Lowe, Jr. and Claudia Arevalo-Lowe