Slashdot Mirror
The First Smiley :-)
An anonymous reader points to this excellent bit of online archaeology -- Mike Jones' effort to find the first online smiley. A bit from the site: "After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x)." Interesting methodology and a lot of work went into the search -- shades of the Dead Media Project.
Nostalgia makes me sad :-(
Because that is much prior-art then the trademarks in itself...
;) (tm)...
Well... they don't go bust... they aren't enforceable anymore... and the owners of it are the only ones that can use a
Cheers...
Here is slashdots first ( 0 )( 0 ) set of knockers.
Here's a link to a usenet posting describing the use of emoticons/smilies (it references Fahlmen).
Interesting that the original smiley had a nose while most of the happy smilies used today go noseless...
I suppose plotting the change would need entirely different study, though.
...that people at Microsoft do inovate!
A speech...
Anyone else kind of surprised that this didn't happen prior to '82?
;-]
Maybe it's just my cynical nature, but it's hard to imagine that emoticons as we know them weren't thrown around amongst colleagues in academia way before this.
At any rate, I'll sleep better now knowing...
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
(_(_
That's funny.
I guess this could also be considered the start of ASCII artwork (http://www.textfiles.com/art/). I much perfer that to the faces which have seem to have gone overboard lately.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...
It's kind of exciting that, with the modern time-scale, we can actually trace things like this to their originator. It's the like that age old question: "All I want to know is who the man is that looked at a cow and said 'I think I drink from whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them.'" I always sort of assumed that the smiley would become much like the milk - of amorphous origins, but part of our culture nonetheless.
To live to see the last.
We should throw a party in a month.
:-}
And just think! In one more year, smiley
will be old enough to buy beer legally!
{hic}
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
I hope that guy becomes famous!!
Yet the moment any of us start coding, damned if we don't come up with naming conventions that mean squat to everyone else. Unless, of course, we've been dictated to use someone elses nonsense! :)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Ah yes, I get all my most important work done in the half hour before lunch, as well.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Check out the inventors home page.
Looks like a happy guy, how appropriate.
The Internet Archive's first crawl of the site was May 08, 1999, if that helps.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
this is more revolutionary than you might think!
We now have proof - justification, if you will, that Microsoft has a *GOOD, LEGITIMATE* reason for their high software prices! Research and Development money....must have been billions to formulate a ':-)'.
Does this mean linux zealots will stop using emoticons? what will replace them? doritocons and mountaindewcons?
----------
Milk the Moose!
-Fleezarpobog
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, great that they found the first smiley, but I will not be satisfied until I see the LAST one. Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing. Now that people have apparently lost this ability, they use a crude text representation of a facial expression. This is not an improvement.
Ooh, let's make it an ongoing series. Where was the first usage of "pr0n"?
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
I know this is a online smiley face, but was the smiley face prominent among typewriter messages, because that would take away from the whole effect.
...how long before he finds himself a lawyer, patents a "method of conveying levity via a sequence of characters typed on a keyboard," and sues, well, everyone? :-)
(Oops!)
~Philly
the first smiley was this:
C:\>
Natural-Selection Be
"It's interesting to note that Microsoft and AOL now intercept these character strings and turn them into little pictures."
Too bad he didn't patent the idea. Ahem.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of neurons.
;-) :-) ;-Q ;-) ;-@
Aaaah! Smilies everywhere....
What? It's a guy with glasses and a big nose laughing.
Forget the smiley, I want the ET holding a chainsaw picture in press format mentioned near the end of the file...
MMmmmm Aliens and powertools.....
-Adam
"...just then a talking chicken told him to shut up - we knew it was all over after that..."
Come on, someone must have written one!
And the brethren went away edified.
:-( is trademarked.
Maybe it's not interesting and not funny, but please use your moderation points on something that really deserves to be moderated up or down.
It was :-) and not (-:. How ... ungauche! :(
It is rumored that Scott Fahlman and his original group currently have persistent neck problems due to the long-term practice of leaning to the left to read text emotion indicators.
For this reason, they have allegedly proposed "vertical ASCII" so that they can be read upright.
(-:
Table-ized A.I.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
(This post, pertaining to beowulf clusters, is certified by me, Anonymous Coward, to be a 100% authentic and genuine beowulf troll post. All other posts in this thread pertaining to beowulf clusters are IMPOSTERS, and the reader is cautioned that clearance to imagine a beowulf cluster of the items to which this post pertains (specifically: "Smileys") is hereby granted only after reading THIS specific beowulf troll post.)
But since they used angle brackets, which eventually HTML also used, they were doomed to obsolesence... after all, posting them on slashdot is way too complicated. :)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
a time machine. Maybe then I can rid the world of the emoticons. Foolish emoticons, the autobots were only the beginning of your worries...
Really funny people (like me) do deliver jokes deadpan. It's called "dry" (or "wry") humor. Check out Steven Wright for an extreme example.
the first "LOL"? ?
is to get the bastard who posted the earliest goatse.cx link in /.
"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."
So the smiley is the digital rimshot to lighten up!
I very much agree. I still refuse to use "emoticon", instead relying on the types of things I first used on BBS's back in the very early 90's.
People I speak with on AIM still have to ask what <g> stands for.
I have added, over the years, some of my own, including <Laughter>, <Shudder>, and <Yawn>
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Despair, Inc. has held the trademark on the :-( for some time, now.
Read all about it.
Pray tell, smiley face
Colon and parenthesis
How am I to feel?
"By the early 1980's, the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards or "bboards". These were a precursor of today's newsgroups, and they were an important social mechanism in the department - a place where faculty, staff, and students could discuss the weighty matters of the day on an equal footing. Many of the posts were serious: talk announcements, requests for information, and things like "I've just found a ring in the fifth-floor men's room. Who does it belong to?" Other posts discussed topics of general interest, ranging from politics to abortion to campus parking to keyboard layout (in increasing order of passion). Even in those days, extended "flame wars" were common."
:-) 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." -Scott E. Fahlman - the inventor of the smiley
"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
Smiley Lore
...the first penis bird?
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
It'll start a new kind of patent, the "email method" patent. And the the patent examiner won't be able to find any prior art, even though he tried really really hard.
So I assume there will a fitting observance in about a week's time? Landmarks like this must be celebrated!
Happy birthday, Smiley!
\end{ mode_:-) }
... for the first (Troll, -1)
speaking out in favor of spam
boring people in a public forum
looking for a date (shudder)
And get this classic quote:
"It has just been suggested that we impose someone's standards on us"
I guess he changed his mind about that being a bad thing.
Found at
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html
From: RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 697 Some Thoughts about advertising
To: stefferud at USC-ISI
1) I didn't receive the DEC message, but I can't imagine I would have been bothered if I have. I get tons of uninteresting mail, and system announcements about babies born, etc. At least a demo MIGHT have been interesting.
2) The amount of harm done by any of the cited "unfair" things the net has been used for is clearly very small. And if they have found any people any jobs, clearly they have done good. If I had a job to offer, I would offer it to my friends first. Is this "evil"? Must I advertise in a paper in every city in the US with population over 50,000 and then go to all of them to interview, all in the name of fairness? Some people, I am afraid, would think so. Such a great insistence on fairness would destort everyone's lives and do much more harm than good. So I state unashamedly that I am in favor of seeing jobs offered via whatever.
3) It has just been suggested that we impose someone's standards on us because otherwise he MIGHT do so. Well, if you feel that those standards are right and necessary, go right ahead and support them. But if you disagree with them, as I do, why hand your opponents the victory on a silver platter? By the suggested reasoning, we should always follow the political views that we don't believe in, and especially those of terrorists, in anticipation of their attempts to impose them on us. If those who think that the job offers are bad are going to try toprevent them, then those of us who think they are unrepugnant should uphold our views. Besides, I doubt that anyone can successfully force a site from outside to impose censorship, if the people there don't fundamentally agree with the desirability of it.
4) Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
Shortly after Microsoft finished patenting ones and zeros, Microsoft decided to patent "The Smile" and "The Frown". By owning the rights to these two figures, Microsoft also owns the rights to the ":", the "-", the "(", and the ")" characters.
Microsoft intends to capitalize on their exclusive rights to the "-" character, and sue Linux users for using them in escape characters without paying tribute to Microsoft.
In addition, Microsoft plans to sue AOL for use of "The Smile", and estimates a total of 1 trillion dollars should be given back to Microsoft due to the approximately 1 thousand "Smiley things" which the average AOL user appears to use on a daily basis.
Also, Microsoft plans to sue all software which uses the "-" (AKA "The Nose") operator in their code without paying Microsoft.
The list just goes on...
now if only we could find the first case of l33t speak.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
...of the first time that I tried to draw one in real life.
:-)
I had just gotten into Usenet (this was 93) and was grading quizzes. I went to draw a smiley because a student got a perfect grade, and caught myself drawing it sideways!
You can get rid of giant internet assholes easy. All you gotta do is uncheck the option in yer slashprefs to see posts by Katz or that cockslapper michael.
The smiley undoubtedly pre-dates my tour. If you think it was invented in 1980s, you are wrong.
For the first person to use the letter u in place of "you". Even better would be the first person to ask someone to do something very time consuming, and be lazy enough that they wouldn't even write a full word out when asking. :-)
Everything will be taken away from you.
zerg
Since the man himself had it online on his website for ages.
Remembering from the old DOS days there was an ASCII character resembling a smiley face. A lot more efficient and keyboards would have looked cooler if that standard would have been established and keyboards designed to adopt it.
Maybe line feed should be replaced in POSIX based systems with a smiley. It would be very entertaining to see a smiley at the end of every line in MS ASCII files.
someone set up us the hyrdalisk!
The first time I encountered a winking emoticon, I was learning about ;-)iChat I couldn't figure out what the heck ; - and ) were doing with the name. I finally figured out to turn my head to the left. ;-)
Now I use it all the time. It only bugs me when I see someone putting 5 dozen into a conversation. It bothers me too if they make a left handed emoticon like (-: because that poor emoticon is standing on its head.
So cheer up people. Emoticons aren't ruining punctuation, they are just adding to it. English goes through changes, and this is just one of them. I can think of worse things that could happen to become mainstream in conversations like... "did ya see tat f#$#ing bi*#h tday. man i wanna smak that ho"
Just think how much easier it is to interpret that writer's mood if they put >:-( after their little rant?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
That's Nabokov all right, inadvertently predicting the invention of the smiley 10 years in advance :). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it had occured to lots of people, and the smiley has a very long history, if only someone could be bothered to dig it up.
I believe there was a law suit trying to gone about a year ago of patenting this. I wonder if this would throw that case out?
MAD magazine did a bit called "Typewri-Toons" back in the early 60's. I don't remember if they did the smiley, but they did come up with a lot of pictorial representations using only a typewriter.
That explains why there were question marks in the answers Alton provided earlier today. I figured he just couldn't type very well.
...and here's the last smiley:
----------*
-- a pointy-headed man with goggles, peacefully oblivious to the spider which dangles above his head. when that smiley is needed, the smiley's evolution will be complete.
mp3s by me
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
=
19-Sep-82 18:56 Jeff Shrager at CMU-10A 38521,03,9(6),9(9),1(5),0
Just signifying that a message is a joke is certainly not sufficient.
One can develop a taxonomy of bboard message types along several different
dimensions. Also, where a continuum is preferable to a taxonomy (such as
where humor value is at issue) one can similarly use a scale to indicate
where along that scale this message lies. Suppose that all dimensions are
refered to by a ten point scale (we'll use all integers here although one
can certainly imagine reals in the case of fine grain continuous scales).
Some dimensions will be bitwise encoded as well.
Here is a sample of a coding scheme:
COMMUNITY: (this is a binary scale with a bit position for
each department totalling about 32 bits)
TOPIC: (two digits 00-99)
(00) Political, (01) Scientific, (02) Computer, (03) Meta, etc
FLAME VALUE: (continuous 0.0-10.0)
HUMOR VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
BORDOM VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
INFORMATIONAL CONTENT: (-10.0 (for queries) to 10.0 (for their answers))
Note that some of these scales are purely according to the opinion
of the author. Thus, we provide, also, a confidence scale: to go along
with each continuous scale (to be enclosed in parens after the value).
who was the first sick freak that used 8==D and (.)(.) in a post?
I've been intreuged by how in asian cultures Japanese Smiles have been different. for example:
;_; Sad
^_^ Happy
=_= Sleepy
\(^o^)/ BANZAI!
There are many others and I really like these better as you don't have to tilt your head to the side or anything. Because Japanese also use a different character encoding (65,536 characters to our teeny-tiny 256) they can get some really creative emotes. I wonder who was the first to come up with the Japanese ones?
O_o =^.^=
ugh... must learn to preview. "...and here's the last smiley:
:( :( :(
----------* {8-)
-- a pointy-headed man with goggles, peacefully oblivious to the spider which dangles above his head. when that smiley is needed, the smiley's evolution will be complete."
mp3s by me
Woo! Take that, MIT! In your face!! :-)
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Looking at the server address for this "research project" (research.microsoft.com), I think this must qualify to be the best research done by any Microsoft-related. Ever. Keep it coming, Microsoft. You might be the first one to figure out who wrote Micro$oft.
wonderful
"...Interesting methodology and a lot of work went into the search..."
First, go to google and enter: smiley emoticon inventor
Then, click on "I'm Feeling Lucky"
Guess whose page pops up? =)
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sorry to burst your balloon, but the use of smiley's
were around in the 60s and 70s in the first online community, PLATO (http://www.platopeople.com). It was extremely common to use them in Notes (threaded discussion areas) and Pnotes (email).
PLATO was an extremely active online community and some of the founders went on to CMU to work on Andrew. Bruce Sherwood, if I got the name right. Make your own decision on where smiley's came from.
Hmm. Pr0n.
hookers and grits.
That's a heckuva piece of work, but the smiley appears to have been generated by parallel evolution. Several people seem to have come up with it independently. I first encountered it on Usenet around the same time period. I don't remember who it was who suggested it; all I remember is that it was a woman and hence couldn't have been Scott Fahlman.
Hey, I always smile backwards. Have been for like 8 years. (:
Deal with it! d:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Every IM and gooey IRC client these days is replacing the noble ASCII smile with the hideous rictus of a yellow dot. Even punctuation is threatened
by the forces of Disnification.
- undoware.ca
This has got to be a hoax. First of all, it is dated almost exactly twenty years before today, so as to set a big milestone this year. Second, I find it impossible to believe the methodology used to get retrieve the message, that a university would have 20 year old backups and still have the people around with the expertise to extract them. Finally, I find the contention that this is the origination of the smiley pretty supsicious -- the fact that it started in a single message on an isolated message board and just a decade later was on every network (e.g. Usenet, GEnie, CIS, etc.) and understood by every computer user. More likely it has sprung up independently many different times in different places, since it's a pretty obvious invention.
On the 19th in fact, it turns 20 years old, according to this information.
Doesn't anyone know internet lore anymore? James "kibo" perry is the creater and true master of the smiley and can type it so quickly and eligantly that it looks like a real face peering out of the monitor. I'd throw a smiley at the end of that, but it seems a bit redundant. :) See what I mean? .sig file in existance.g y/kibo_ sig.pdf
Kibo is also the owner of the most warlordable
The pdf version of the sig is here:
ftp://ftp.std.com/pub2/alt.religion.kibolo
http://www.kibo.net
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
it's funny. i can still remember seeing my first :) on a bbs a LONG time ago and not knowing what it was.
"turn your head sideways" oh hehe it's a smiley face.
how about umop apisdn?
that blew my fucking mind at the time.
I love that the message (and others of that time period) tell people to "turn sideways"! I can't look at ":-)" without seeing a "smiley".
The opposite happens to me now when I say "see ya". I actually think CYA.
Language is a funny thing.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Typical slashdot.... Don't give microsoft credit. It's not Mike Jones from microsoft... it's just Mike Jones. If it was any other research house, i'm sure it would have been there. But what else do you expect from Slashdot? I suppose just posting it is a step in the right directection towards no bias news.
...that no-one has mentioned the Denoser project.
:).
Simply put, if your website is smiley-heavy, you can achieve up to a 33% reduction in bandwidth costs simply by removing the nose from your smiley
OK, that's my contribution to Ancient Geek studies over with...
Well you proved your point, nobody actually got your joke.
Delivery is everything!
The address of the site that points to this!? research.microsoft.com, is that where the 50 bil goes, into finding where the first smily came from? Holy crap, I now know why Windows is the steaming pile of horse excrement that it is.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Go through "A Modest Proposal" and sprinkle smileys liberally. For extra credit, turn your revised edition in to your English Teacher under the title "A Modernized Proposal." When said teacher chastizes you for plagarism, simply write on the chalkboard ";-)"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Geez, man. Lighten up. It's just some guy doing something he thought was cool. It's not a directive from Bill to seize the net.culture as MS's own. Just a friendly guy named Mike. Doing something cool. It's fun. Smile.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I mean, the article really doesn't go into any detail about how it was determined that this was the first smiley... just the first smiley at CMU... just because this guy first proposed it at CMU then, doesn't mean someone didn't propose it earlier someplace else. I'd love to see a more extensive search to see if that is, indeed, the first smiley...
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
sorry, but you are.
aside from the childish '$', you might have noticed that this was a personal page, as opposed to one of the many research projects at research.microsoft.com, meaning that it was of personal interest.
i'm sorry, but i have to know.
when was the first penis bird used?
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
(:-O <===8
Do they ever ask what Repetitive fawning crap goes here... means?
Instead of researching security holes, or how to make their OS's not suck, they're digging around tapes looking for ascii smilies. Wow. :)
But one thing I would like to find that I dimly remember is the first use (on Arpanet mailing lists in the late 70s) of the Johnny Storm "Flame On!" when getting angry in a posting.
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Scott E. Fahlman's Home Page :-)[http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/]
Anyway, there was a page about emoticons, listing a bunch of variations on the smiley. It's quite amusing. I was going to put them all here, but the lameness filter isn't letting me, so I'll just post a few highlights to whet your appetite and look for a link (here's one; click Internet in the left frame then search the right frame for "smiley"):
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
"Books" and personal communications are different environments. Although I do (occasionally) use smileys it doesn't mean that I need to because I have no other way of expressing myself effectively. It simply means that for the particular communication in question I determine the smiley to be an effective method of quickly and easily clarifying meaning. While I could say "Just joking by the way!", a ";)" is just as effective.
Or perhaps I should compose all my correspondence in sonnet form, just to show I have an impressive "grasp of the written word".......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
There are some distinguished CMU profs like Touretzsky, Carbonell, and Thibadeau in those posts.
I'll bet that one guy with the joke post never thought that this would come back to haunt him two decades later.
May we never see th
I recall back in 1979 that smiley's and other emoticons were in use on Unix and VAX systems....geez, even Bank of America's internal network used them.
Amazing how many "first appeared" that are purported are just not true...
Smily is a vulger term, right up there with people who say 'lol' and 'rotfifjuadbiacm' or whatever the heck that means.
The Internet is generally stupid
:-) ...at least for a few seconds.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
...online Klingon. }}-[
Face mark
Mona
ASCII art stories
Japanese fonts are required.:-)
Did anyone notice that the very next post after Fahlman's invented post moderation? (albeit self moderation) quoted here:
19-Sep-82 18:56 Jeff Shrager at CMU-10A 38521,03,9(6),9(9),1(5),0
Just signifying that a message is a joke is certainly not sufficient.
One can develop a taxonomy of bboard message types along several different
dimensions. Also, where a continuum is preferable to a taxonomy (such as
where humor value is at issue) one can similarly use a scale to indicate
where along that scale this message lies. Suppose that all dimensions are
refered to by a ten point scale (we'll use all integers here although one
can certainly imagine reals in the case of fine grain continuous scales).
Some dimensions will be bitwise encoded as well.
Here is a sample of a coding scheme:
COMMUNITY: (this is a binary scale with a bit position for
each department totalling about 32 bits)
TOPIC: (two digits 00-99)
(00) Political, (01) Scientific, (02) Computer, (03) Meta, etc
FLAME VALUE: (continuous 0.0-10.0)
HUMOR VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
BORDOM VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
INFORMATIONAL CONTENT: (-10.0 (for queries) to 10.0 (for their answers))
Note that some of these scales are purely according to the opinion
of the author. Thus, we provide, also, a confidence scale: to go along
with each continuous scale (to be enclosed in parens after the value).
Agreed. Humor in real life conversation is conveyed not only through words, but also through body language, tone, and context. In text, you have none of the first two, and the third can often be impaired.
/. or IM :-)
While we're at it, we should add a flashing "Applause" sign to the writers toolchest!
IOW: We should stop blatantly telling the reader how to feel, and rather improve the writing to convey the emotion. This is of course wrt real writing, rather than droning on
...the first set of THESE (.)(.) where seen on a computer screen! Spend $50 million on researching THAT, M$FT!
(Ironically enough, to make that "bodicon" appear correctly on
And one for the road ->
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I wonder when the Japanese/asian smileys which are better looking than the standard smiley came about, for those who haven't seen them, here're a few:
^o^ the laughing smiley
-_-; the upset smiley
^L^ the big nosed face smiley
-o- the yawning smiley
^^;;;; the sweating smiley
etc etc
So much in most languages, certianly English, relies on tone. This is something that simply cannot be conveyed through text. In something like a novel you can take the time to rewrite things such that the language truly indicates what you mean to convey, and you also have teh benefit of speaking about a character's actions (eg. "And that was smart", Jim remarked with a smirk). With realtime communiactions you have no such advantages. YOu have to come up with your response quickly, and have little ability to comment on them. A simley is sucha device. YOu can indicate the general intended tone of a remark. I can think of many phrases that I would use that could mean many different things depending on how I said them. For example:
:) would let them know that I am just kidding and playing with them.
"Well you reall screwed that up."
Now if I said that in a jovial, joking, manner, it would mean that I'm kidding, you really didn't screw up that bad, I'm just harassing you. If I said that in a neutral, professional tone, it woul be a comment, that you did indeed mess something up. If I yelled that, it would eman that not only did you do it, but it pissed me off personally.
While I can't truly convery that in a qucik text message, smileys can help. If I just typed it as is, it would probably be intereprted in the neutral sense I spoke of, and the person would believe that I was really indicating that I believed they ahd sincerely screwed up. Adding a
Hey! Let's celebrate next thursday or something ;)
The smiley will actually be 20 years old :) ;)
Ne ;)
and it case that doesn't show up, why the fuck doesn't
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Writing a letter (as people did in the olden days, or so I am told) is hardly the same as typing messages in ICQ, email or IRC. When one writes a letter, one has the time to carefully weigh the thrust of each sentence so that ones meaning isn't lost upon the reader. On line communication is often more like to spoken conversation rather than written communication. Real people don't speak like characters in a book. In normal conversation, people use half-sentences, they slur over bits of words, and most importantly people can see and gauge each other's emotions. Similarly, in on-line conversation, people use abbreviations and they make spelling mistakes that they don't care to correct. What is missing is facial expressions, and smileys fill that gap.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Franklin Loufrani, who is credited with creating the original smiley to indicate good news in some European newspapers in 1972. See more here.
He apparently has them trademarked in various contries and has threatened to defend the trademark" though I suspect it might be a bit late to do so in the UK after the acid house craze. (Incidentally, this article to provides a different explanation for the history of the smiley.)
See World Smile Corp if you want to use the trademark.
They already did!
evry1 nos that w/o im on the net that u would not have the kewl stuff 2day that evry1 reads and I 4 1 could not do w/o all the kewl smiley faces that make me smile IRL when I read the kewl stuff my frend mails me hahaha look its a frog in a blender LOL LMAO :)
I was still using the pathetic as late as 1985. So were most everyone else on the BBS's I frequented.
:-) became widely used, but I didn't think it was before around 92. at least not in my circles...
I don't really recall when the
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I hope they're saving all the posts around it-- not just that thread, but all the backup tapes. It's hard to know what will become worth knowing in a few decades' time-- I doubt anyone would have thought that Fahlman's post would be significant twenty years on.
I'm sure Google would take them. They've got so much old stuff already, and they already archive significant amounts of non-news-based discussion.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
http://www.smileylicensing.com/about/about_03.html
:-)
"Smiley has over 300 partners worldwide who manufacture and distribute Smiley branded consumer products for babies, children, teens and adults."
Are any of you paying royalties to Smiley Licensing?
Here's my $0.02 worth:
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
So if this really is the very first occurrence of the smiley, it will be its 20th birthday in exactly 6 days (19 september).
:-) or similar.
Of course, there's no way of knowing for sure this was its first use; probably scores of people got the idea to use
We've got bigger problem's to worry about.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
That makes the 19th of September the 20th anniversary ;)
So now we know the name of the bastard who invented smilies. Bastard. Allows emotions to be conveyed in plain text, does it? People have been expressing emotions in plain text for millenia without any fucking colons and brackets tacked onto the end to show whether it's funny or not.
Stupid bastard.
So now we just need to know the bastard's address, so we can go round there and mete out some suitable Jay and Silent Bob style revenge on the bastard.
Next we'll track down and get medieval on the arses of those sub-literate fucks who spell everything like Prince song titles.
"Information wants to be paid"
My sister and I used to "type pictures" on my parents old suitcase typewriter. We made all sorts of pictures. I wish I still had some around.
comment directly in my journal
Yeah, it's not what it used to be....
I was first introduced to another kind of smiley. As I was hanging out in a university BBS (circa 1987), people frequently used *\/*. Try to imagine two cheeks with the lips smiling. It does not look much like a smiley on the web, but you could clearly see it on a VT100 terminal. It also had the advantage that you didn't need to turn you head sideway to see it. :)
Wow, what a rebel! Too cool. I want to be like you.
I wonder what the "given current trends" are they were talking about in the NG.
Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.
Is it something Mike B. Jones won't tell us on a Microbloat Site?
I find it interesting that the upside-down smiley (-: was first seen less than 30 hours after the smiley's invention.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
}(;) - It means Kiss my ass
I've had to use Transl8it on more than one occasion to try to figure out what someone was saying.
So much for the burden of communication resting on the sender, rather than the receiver...
Happy 20th Birthday to the Smiley :-)
I was just about to patent the smiley. I guess this is prior art.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Comic Book Store Guy: "There is no emoticon adequate to express what I'm feeling right now."
CABF02 - The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
The earliest (not first: you can never precisely say which was first) recorded smiley in print discovered so far was found by etymologist and word researcher Barry Popik who posted this message to the email list of the American Dialect Society:
i nd 0110B&L=ads-l&P=R4596
:) :(
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=
[begin quote]
This continues discussion of the pictograph known as the "smiley." It's authorship was credited to the late Harvey Ball (who drew it in the 1960s). "Smiley" is in an ad in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 10 March 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. See for yourself. The ad is for the film LILI, with the "delightful" Leslie Caron. The "World Premiere Today" is at the Trans-Lux 52nd on Lexington. The film opened nationwide, and this ad possibly ran in many newspapers.
Today
You'll laugh
You'll cry
You'll love (Heart-shaped face--ed.)
_Lili_
[end quote]
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Aaaahhhhhh! you created a 4-eyed monster! (See your subjectline)
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
THis is really wierd, as I was just thinking this exact question about a week ago (honest). Good works guys!
Surely someone eons ago with a typewriter had stumbled upon this sequence of characters.
I'm a 2000 man.
Well, I for one am glad to see that Microsoft is doing something useful with it's time!
-snevine
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside
Most likely because a lot of the flamers and trolls never actually stop.
How do you convey "holding pinky finger to chin with one eyebrow raised, like Dr. Evil"? What's that emoticon?
Software Wars
In the words of the late great Frank Zappa, "who gives a fuck anyway?"
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
/* Anonymity isn't all it's cracked up to be. */
;-)
Who are you quoting?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
'Course like all else DOS, it was backwards.
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
The only problem I have with the smiley is I /abuse it so much :-). The sad thing is when people meet me in RL, they think I'm always happy =)
:-)
Oh well
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
If the :-) was claimed to be first used online in 1982, the PCs character set (and other home computers) predates that, so it is simply a case of going back to the original idea. I use the right way up (circle, two dots, smile, nose) glyph when I am hand-writing letters, rather than :-)
Just imagine, in our day and age of intellectual property, copyrights and trademarks...if Jim had only protected his copyright to that little emoticon... He'd be a wealthy man, now wouldn't he? :-)
However, since he had the forethought not to do so, he has created something that has much a part of our daily lives as the air we breath and the cola we guzzle.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Now all that is needed is to find the creator of the Korean Smiley, a.la:
^_^
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
When did the first gay cum?
THe biggest problem is that a lot of homor and communication is visual. The wry smile at the end, the slight raising of an eyebrow can change the tone completely of a dialogue.
A lot of people overuse smilies, but sometimes they are essential.
My own sense of humor is exceptionally deadpan and serious at times and sometimes people look at me in horor until they see the wink just as I am walking away. Or a conspiratorial glance and twitch of the corner of the mouth at a friend.
Like all text based communication (and to a certain extent telephone communication) there is a limit to how much can be conveyed withour prior knowedge of the individual involved.
Humor is always subjective and often subtle.
Working for the (other) man
It's not really a quote, though. Note the lack of quotation marks. It's more of a comment, as indicated by the well-known C-style comment delimiters. It's also attributable to me, as I am logged-in and therefore not Anonymous.
Assholes can still be funny. Just look at Dennis Leary or Lewis Black.
A lot of times you'll rip into someone for the entertainment of others. You don't need a smiley for that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I wish LOL wasn't so abused. Theoretically, it should mean "I am so amused, I actually made a noise" but I think it's been way watered-down, especially by people who use it to emphasize their own damn jokes, ala "You think you guys are gonna win the tourney? LOL!"...see, I don't think someone would actually laugh at that as they were writing. People use it to say "that's laughable" rather than "I'm actually laughing".
:-D , 'Course AIM et al have decide that's a big cheesy smile, not a laugh. Those pricks.
"HAHAHA" and "Heh!" kind of work, sort of.
Or a note like *audibly amused*.
I used to use
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Umm I have seen hundreds of old typewrite pages that people did :) on that date to the 40s at least. In fact the >'))>> fish is at the bottom of a corrispondence that my client got in 1933! I would wager that the :) is at least as old as the first typewriters. Did everyone forget that before computers we had those old things? I feel old... think I'll go watch paint dry now while I soak my dentures....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Long before USENET there was PLATO. PLATO had emoticons galore, much richer than the ASCII ones that came later.
On PLATO, one created emoticons by taking advantage of the SHIFT-space capability. Whenever you pressed SHIFT-space, the cursor moved back exactly one space. You could then type over the previous character. Combinations of certain characters led to all kinds of faces, smileys, beer glasses, you name it.
To see some of these examples, go to www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html.
- Brian Dear
Working on a book on the history of PLATO
But in typing class in 1978, we would make all kinds 'pictures' using keys. Much to the frustration of our teacher.
I can gaurentee you we weren't the first.
OTOH qudos to the researcher that managed to dig this up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The real leap of faith has to be on that one fateful day when someone was getting searched at a border crossing and one of the guards thought to themself "I wonder if hes carrying anything in his butt".
Fucking patent-abuse sucks.
. . .considering that Microsoft has put an emoticon at the end of its latest OS . . .
XP
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
We had to walk to school through six feet of snow, year round, through the blistering heat, straight up, both ways, and we liked it.
:-) and assign it a meaning, if only in type, then we have contributed to the information density of every word we type. This is because not only does the person who reads a :-) know that we intend the preceeding statement to be a joke, but he or she can also deduce that based on our awareness and usage of this charachter, that we will not try to approximate it using other words. This means that if I were to use words one might otherwise use to approximate the meaning of a :-), the reciever of the message can know that I must have some reason for using the words instead of the :-). Therefor, to outlaw any potential meaning carrier needlessly cripples communication. If we can assume that each person's goal while using verbal communication is to clearly and quickly communicate a specific message, then it always serves this goal to incoorporate new meaningful symbols and thus more uncertainty (information), and it always works to the contrary to remove symbols.
:-)
Bah.
Just because it's possible to do things in a older, harder way, doesn't mean they should be done this way. To paraphrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," doesn't mean "If it works, don't improve it."
Here's what's more or less a mathematical proof of why you'd be retarded not to use smilies:
In information theory, information is defined as uncertainty. The more possible messages that can be received, the more information one of them carries. This means that if you are sending a stream of bits (ones and zeroes, like computers use), you'd have to send many, many bits to achieve the same level of information density as if you were sending roman charachters, of which there are 26. We humans typically communicate using words, of which we have thousands, which we represent with strings of 26 unique letters and some punctuation marks. The word "complimentary" carries much more information to its recipient than any one letter, say, "f", simply because there are too few letters for one of them to carry such a specialized meaning. As such, if we can take the formerly meaningless string
Think of '80s mallrat bimbos. They only had 3 words: "like", "y'know", and "whatever". Remember how many of these they had to string together to get meaning out of them? "Like, y'know, like, whatever, y'know?"
Interestingly, the same argument can be used to show that it's retarded to outlaw words like fuck, shit, and ass.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 1994 04:29:08 -0500
:)
Cc: unix-haters@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Re: Re- Stalin never had it so good...
I think we can all agree that the odious typed smiley faces so beloved
of the mass of ignorant unix nethead weenies, who never learned to
express themselves in written form, and who therefore clutch at these
pathetic glyphs as if by sprinkling a few grains of malodorous
typographical powder upon a heavyhanded ignorant misspelled missive it
will magically become imbued with lighthearted humor and wise witty
sarcasm, have no place on unix-haters.
Unless he has checked every possible source it is only the first known on-line smiley
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'm certain that I saw :-) explained in a "filler" at the end of an article in Reader's Digest before 1974. It was mentioned by whom the symbol was being used, but I don't remember that detail. It was explained as being a symbol for "tongue-in-cheek".
.. and has anyone else been completely screwed by the htmlization of email leading to 'unrecognized tags' being dropped. so your tag at the end of an otherwise harsh-seeming sentence gets dropped, completely changing the meaning of the text.
I've taken to using { brackets to be on the safe side - as in {sarcasm} {/sarcasm} when i don't know what email client the recipient is using. yuk.
Was that meta? Or meta-meta? I think my brain just exploded...
I am alone, yet I also surf the universal backwash of undifferentiated Being, which is LOVE.
Your Windows/Office tax dollars at work.
I just use :: ::. As in, ::grins::, or ::rolls around::, or ::jumps:: .
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
such as:
:-)
03-Oct-82 23:43 Guy Jacobson at CMU-780G Holding a chainsaw??
Does anyone have a picture of R2D2 holding a seed auger in TeX format?
Or how about a rendering of Yoda with a lathe for use with nroff?
Any pointers to digitized images of short, cute aliens holding power
tools would be greatly appreciated.
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
this stuff is gold!
==========snip==========
03-Oct-82 21:47 Wilson Harvey at CMU-IUS For anyone interested
I have a picture of ET holding a chainsaw in
exists in
=
03-Oct-82 23:43 Guy Jacobson at CMU-780G Holding a chainsaw??
Does anyone have a picture of R2D2 holding a seed auger in TeX format?
Or how about a rendering of Yoda with a lathe for use with nroff?
Any pointers to digitized images of short, cute aliens holding power
tools would be greatly appreciated.
=
Did you pay your licensing fees to use the frowny emoticon????
:)
You may or may not know it, but the frowny emoticon is a registered trademark of Despair, Inc!
Be sure to license before use, to avoid any nasty lawsuits
Place sig here.
The phrasing: "All I want to know is who the man is that looked at a cow and said 'I think I drink from whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them.'"
Came from a Calvin and Hobbes strip.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Veterans of the PLATO system (you know, the place where networked notesfiles (usenet), irc, instant messaging and multiplayer games were invented 30 years ago) will remember animated emoticons being created in the early '70s.
:-) on PLATO, they would have been scolded for being uncreative.
PLATO terminals had a 512x512 pixel screen, and one could create typeable strings that could backspace, super and subscript, and overprint (in AND or OR mode) characters. Numerous versions of smileys were created that actually looked like little smiling faces, and not sideways either.
If anyone used
R
"World Domination - a fun, family activity"
"HAHAHAHAHAHA, God damn man that's so fucking funny. LOL".
If I find something funny online I usually will respond with "heh" or "hah" or "hahah" depending on the humor level. I'll only LOL if it's actually the truth.
I used to think "LOL" was beneath me, but I ran into problems when I was actually laughing out loud and wanted to tell people that. I felt like a moron saying "I'm actually laughing out loud man."
I would never type "ROTFL" unless, well, I was rolling on the floor laughing. Or had done so. Since that's never actualy happened in my whole life...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ok guys!
u p/
. txt
Go to
http://ftp.std.com/obi/Networking/archives/msggro
Donwload the msggroup.1001-1100-z
Rename to msggroup.1001-1100-z.gz
gzip -d msggroup.1001-1100-z.gz
vi msggroup.1001-1100-z
e see the following:
15-Apr-79 12:05:26-PST,1142;000000000000
Mail-from: MIT-MC rcvd at 12-Apr-79 1740-PST
Date: 12 APR 1979 1736-PST
From: MACKENZIE at USC-ECL
Subject: MSGGROUP#1015 METHICS and the Fast Draw(cont'd)
To: ~drxal-hda at OFFICE-1
cc: msggroup at MIT-MC, malasky at PARC-MAXC
In regard to your message a few days ago concerning the loss
of meaning in this medium:
I am new here, and thus hesitate to comment, but I too have
suffered from the lack of tone, gestures, facial expressions
etc. May I suggest the beginning of a solution? Perhaps we could
extend the set of punctuation we use, i.e:
If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant
with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so:
"Of course you know I agree with all the current
administration's policies -)."
The "-)" indicates tongue-in-cheek.
This idea is not mine, but stolen from a Reader's Digest article
I read long ago on a completly different subject. I'm sure there
are many other, better ways to improve our punctuation.
Any comments?
Kevin
-------
This is the really first smiley. -)
And to know more about the MsgGroup see
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/overhead_gov
Mahna Mahna
It's their fault for using software that uses an HTML rendering engine to display email. :-P Then again, I've always used ":-)" and variants of it. I think I saw "<g>" only on GEnie...thought it ("<g>", that is) was ghey, so I didn't use it.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Who is "Kevin"? Anybody knows?
For all those people who think :-) makes us lazy writters... look at how many people believed that :-( is trademarked... :-)... follow the link, it's a joke.
In 1979, someone named Kevin MacKenzie suggested the symbol -) for "tongue in cheek". It's not a "smiley", of course, but it serves the same function. I've archived the exchange that included the post: http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/English309/emoticon.txt
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
They had smileys in the Bible. King James Version. :)
I, like the inventor, hate AOL emoticons. They remove the extensibility of all the symbols they intercept.
The Smiley thread gave me an idea I never thought of, though - the way to avoid some of the assymetrical symbols is to type them backwards (-:
Does anyone else find this amusing? You know, that any of the Microsoft researchers would have time to research this while such a monstrous security audit was going on? :-)
LOL
Just messing with you, Mike.
This is BS. The first smiley was probably on a typewriter, not a computer.
Just out of curiousity, does anybody know who first used the abbrev /. or the term "slashdott'ed?" I'd guess that perhaps the site creators used /. but it would be interesting to know who first coined slashdotted, slashdot effect, and other slash-related terminology.
Emoticon for what emotion, I'm not exactly sure but its still cool:
~0
jeje.
Small Black Dog
zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! zerg! Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. all yer zerg are belong to us all yer zerg are belong to us (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12, @10:15PM (#4249145) someone set up us the hyrdalisk! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. all yer zerg are belong to us all yer zerg are belong to us (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12, @10:15PM (#4249145) someone set up us the hyrdalisk! [ Reply to This | Parent ]
Smileys appear in the Quantium Link manual as part of Q speak.
:) after a joke so this is hardly a unique request.
By that time no doupt smileys were already in commen use.
By 1992 Quantum Link had shut down and the parent company would later be renamed America OnLine.
A note for future arceologests. Recomendations of this sort are usually for long tested slang.
It's often recomended that a person say jk or
I don't actually exist.
Seems that Redhat and others are moving to the UTF/Unicode which should solve lots of problems in char encoding.
Unfortunately, there is only T H R E E smileys in unicode when people nowdays use tens of them in daily text. It looks like the unicode is going to be another version of ASCII - collection of junk what nobody uses. :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
CNN is running an article today about the first smiley, done by IBM Researcher, Scott Fahlman. They are saying it occured today (September 19th), not on the 10th.
And the last smiley of this discussion. :)