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.

Comments

Usenet and Emoticons

[messiertom]

Here's a link to a usenet posting describing the use of emoticons/smilies (it references Fahlmen).

Re:Usenet and Emoticons

[generic-man]

A bit of trivia: the Carnegie Mellon user who posted that ancient message is Jim Morris. Most CMU computer science majors would recognize Prof. Morris: he's now the dean of the School of Computer Science.

Spread the word, Jim. :-)

Re:RFC?

[undeg chwech]

2664

Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[s20451]

I agree for some types of humor. However, if you try to use text (such as e-mail, or this comment) to convey sarcasm, I guarantee you will come off as an asshole unless you indicate that you are kidding by using a smiley. Humor can be conveyed by any number of signals beyond the words themselves, such as tone of voice and facial expression.

1970s and earlier probably

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in the Air Force in the mid 70s, I was stationed at Patrick AFB as a weather tty op. We'd exchange chit-chat with other ops on the wx net and jokes were often punctuated with "hi hi" or a :)

The smiley undoubtedly pre-dates my tour. If you think it was invented in 1980s, you are wrong.

Not such a discovery

[senbei]

Since the man himself had it online on his website for ages.

MAD Magazine

[macbot3000]

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.

Re:Geek & Naming Conventions

[ksp]

Actually, you didn't come up it first. Perhaps a subconscious reminder?

http://www.smileydictionary.com/history.html

"Back in the early 70's Franklin Loufrani a journalist created a simple concept for France soir and other European newspapers, he displayed icons to communicate news and especially good ones. He gave this original icon the name of Smiley, it was published for the first time on Jan 1st 1972."

Earliest *online* smiley maybe, not first ever

[MoNickels]

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:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=i nd 0110B&L=ads-l&P=R4596

[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]

Re:Hoax??

[peterb]

Hi, please don't be a huge raging dickhead. You're completely, utterly, and didactically wrong.

I used to work for the CMU CS facilities department; we did make all our backups on 9 track tapes, they are kept forever, and it was a huge pain in the ass for Jeff to track down the relevant equipment to do the restore. We're lucky he was able to get it restored -- very often, tapes that old just disintegrate, even when stored properly, as these were.

So don't call friends of mine liars, and I won't call you a vacuous drooling moron, OK?

And as for how it could spread quickly, don't forget the meme theory of ideas, and the fact that CMU was on Usenet from a hideously early date.

Note that I'm not affiliated with either CMU (except as an alumni and former co-worker) or Microsoft.

Smiley Over 80 Years Old People

[kenp2002]

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....