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

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.