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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 :-(
(_(_
That's funny.
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!
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'
...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
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.
Lighten the fuck up. :-)
;-)
...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!
"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.'"
Kinda like the native amercans who first smoked weed. How many weeds did they have to smoke before they got the right one?
Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput. :)
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
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
I've heard it summed up in this quote: "The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire."
Here is slashdot's first (*) asshole.
Too skinny, I suspect, for most of the nerds here. Try this:
(_*_)
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
print "Yet another p{erl,ython} hacker\n",
Except no one knows what the rules for emoticons(?) are. I know rules are uncool and all but...
:))?
How are we supposed to put smileys into parenthesis (like
And goddamnit it always fucks up my paren-matching in emacs.
And whats with the ^^&:o/o)) that turns into a stoned pumkin with a santa hat eating a bald chickin in yahoo messenger?
And how much happier does three smileys make you compared to one smiley?
Sure, I was all gung ho about smileys too. Then they started making them *backward*. WTF?
I think it was Scott McNeally who said something like most of us don't deserve the formatting abilities of of even ASCII. This is what he means.
We've got bigger problem's to worry about.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Aaaahhhhhh! you created a 4-eyed monster! (See your subjectline)
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
/* 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.
That is your ass, and this over here is your elbow, and NO they ARE NOT the same thing.