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The First Smiley :-)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cave-paintings-be-damned dept.

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.

4 of 462 comments (clear)

  1. Usenet and Emoticons by messiertom · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Usenet and Emoticons by generic-man · · Score: 4, Informative

      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. :-)

      --
      For more information, click here.
  2. 1970s and earlier probably by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  3. Re:Hoax?? by peterb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.