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.

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[willpost]

"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."

"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 :-) 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

Smiley Lore

Re:Another birth?

[Bonker]

Nah, ASCII art has been around a lot longer than that. In the same thread, they're referencing Nroff, Press, and Tex formatted images of ET and Yoda.

One of my father-in-law's favorite war stories was about his stint as a communications officer at a U.S. base in South Korea during the Veitnam war. At one point a good buddy in the U.S. sent him and his fellows a fairly high resolution black and white version of Playboy's Miss October 71... via teletype. The image had to be stapled together from multiple teletype sheets (4 feet wide and 6 feet long, I think he said) and viewed from several feet away before the print characters were recognizable as a female figure.

How about the first use of "flame on"/"flame off"

[btempleton]

A while ago I researched the history of the term Spam and found interesting things.

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.

Now that they've dug up this post...

[marnanel]

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.

Back when I was a kid...

[UberQwerty]

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.

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 :-) 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.

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. :-)