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

may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[Jamie Zawinski]

Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...

"The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent." -- Jim Showalter

Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster, quoting Jim Showalter:

It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent

I understand completely. That's why, when I tell a joke, I make sure to do it in a total monotone, completely deadpan. That way I don't accidentally teach my audience to ignore their better judgment or to rely on body language.

Oh, in case it wasm't clear: :)

Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[gilroy]

The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.

Adding even more, it also makes sense that we should not use commas to indicate pauses -- or periods for sentence stops -- since that should be clear from context. We wouldn't want readers coming to rely upon mere punctuation, now would we?

Strange.

[neksys]

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.

Precursor to smiley in 1973

[Broccolist]

Ha. I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else on the Internet, but interestingly enough, the smiley occured to the author Vladimir Nabokov (known for the novel Lolita, which incidentally rules) back in 1973. I was reading a book of interviews with him (Strong Opinions) and I started when I saw this bit:

[asked how he would rank himself among great writers]
I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

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.