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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.
Nostalgia makes me sad :-(
Here's a link to a usenet posting describing the use of emoticons/smilies (it references Fahlmen).
Anyone else kind of surprised that this didn't happen prior to '82?
;-]
Maybe it's just my cynical nature, but it's hard to imagine that emoticons as we know them weren't thrown around amongst colleagues in academia way before this.
At any rate, I'll sleep better now knowing...
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...
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.
To live to see the last.
We should throw a party in a month.
:-}
And just think! In one more year, smiley
will be old enough to buy beer legally!
{hic}
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
Yet the moment any of us start coding, damned if we don't come up with naming conventions that mean squat to everyone else. Unless, of course, we've been dictated to use someone elses nonsense! :)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Check out the inventors home page.
Looks like a happy guy, how appropriate.
Here is slashdot's first (*) asshole.
Well, great that they found the first smiley, but I will not be satisfied until I see the LAST one. Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing. Now that people have apparently lost this ability, they use a crude text representation of a facial expression. This is not an improvement.
People today are way to busy to deal with the - in the :-). We've got things to do and people to see.
...how long before he finds himself a lawyer, patents a "method of conveying levity via a sequence of characters typed on a keyboard," and sues, well, everyone? :-)
(Oops!)
~Philly
Forget the smiley, I want the ET holding a chainsaw picture in press format mentioned near the end of the file...
MMmmmm Aliens and powertools.....
-Adam
"...just then a talking chicken told him to shut up - we knew it was all over after that..."
Come on, someone must have written one!
And the brethren went away edified.
No, here is Slashdot's first asshole.
In loving remembrance of good ol' WIPO.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
It was :-) and not (-:. How ... ungauche! :(
It is rumored that Scott Fahlman and his original group currently have persistent neck problems due to the long-term practice of leaning to the left to read text emotion indicators.
For this reason, they have allegedly proposed "vertical ASCII" so that they can be read upright.
(-:
Table-ized A.I.
But since they used angle brackets, which eventually HTML also used, they were doomed to obsolesence... after all, posting them on slashdot is way too complicated. :)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I very much agree. I still refuse to use "emoticon", instead relying on the types of things I first used on BBS's back in the very early 90's.
People I speak with on AIM still have to ask what <g> stands for.
I have added, over the years, some of my own, including <Laughter>, <Shudder>, and <Yawn>
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
"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."
:-) 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
"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
Smiley Lore
Shortly after Microsoft finished patenting ones and zeros, Microsoft decided to patent "The Smile" and "The Frown". By owning the rights to these two figures, Microsoft also owns the rights to the ":", the "-", the "(", and the ")" characters.
Microsoft intends to capitalize on their exclusive rights to the "-" character, and sue Linux users for using them in escape characters without paying tribute to Microsoft.
In addition, Microsoft plans to sue AOL for use of "The Smile", and estimates a total of 1 trillion dollars should be given back to Microsoft due to the approximately 1 thousand "Smiley things" which the average AOL user appears to use on a daily basis.
Also, Microsoft plans to sue all software which uses the "-" (AKA "The Nose") operator in their code without paying Microsoft.
The list just goes on...
The smiley undoubtedly pre-dates my tour. If you think it was invented in 1980s, you are wrong.
Since the man himself had it online on his website for ages.
Remembering from the old DOS days there was an ASCII character resembling a smiley face. A lot more efficient and keyboards would have looked cooler if that standard would have been established and keyboards designed to adopt it.
Maybe line feed should be replaced in POSIX based systems with a smiley. It would be very entertaining to see a smiley at the end of every line in MS ASCII files.
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.
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.
That explains why there were question marks in the answers Alton provided earlier today. I figured he just couldn't type very well.
No, because the Despair trademark only applied to greeting cards, posters and art prints.
Woo! Take that, MIT! In your face!! :-)
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
1994 was the first non-chinese text/amiga code instance in the newsgroups. Man I'm bored.
That's a heckuva piece of work, but the smiley appears to have been generated by parallel evolution. Several people seem to have come up with it independently. I first encountered it on Usenet around the same time period. I don't remember who it was who suggested it; all I remember is that it was a woman and hence couldn't have been Scott Fahlman.
Trademarks are not patents.
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Every IM and gooey IRC client these days is replacing the noble ASCII smile with the hideous rictus of a yellow dot. Even punctuation is threatened
by the forces of Disnification.
- undoware.ca
This has got to be a hoax. First of all, it is dated almost exactly twenty years before today, so as to set a big milestone this year. Second, I find it impossible to believe the methodology used to get retrieve the message, that a university would have 20 year old backups and still have the people around with the expertise to extract them. Finally, I find the contention that this is the origination of the smiley pretty supsicious -- the fact that it started in a single message on an isolated message board and just a decade later was on every network (e.g. Usenet, GEnie, CIS, etc.) and understood by every computer user. More likely it has sprung up independently many different times in different places, since it's a pretty obvious invention.
I love that the message (and others of that time period) tell people to "turn sideways"! I can't look at ":-)" without seeing a "smiley".
The opposite happens to me now when I say "see ya". I actually think CYA.
Language is a funny thing.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Typical slashdot.... Don't give microsoft credit. It's not Mike Jones from microsoft... it's just Mike Jones. If it was any other research house, i'm sure it would have been there. But what else do you expect from Slashdot? I suppose just posting it is a step in the right directection towards no bias news.
...that no-one has mentioned the Denoser project.
:).
Simply put, if your website is smiley-heavy, you can achieve up to a 33% reduction in bandwidth costs simply by removing the nose from your smiley
OK, that's my contribution to Ancient Geek studies over with...
Go through "A Modest Proposal" and sprinkle smileys liberally. For extra credit, turn your revised edition in to your English Teacher under the title "A Modernized Proposal." When said teacher chastizes you for plagarism, simply write on the chalkboard ";-)"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Geez, man. Lighten up. It's just some guy doing something he thought was cool. It's not a directive from Bill to seize the net.culture as MS's own. Just a friendly guy named Mike. Doing something cool. It's fun. Smile.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Here is slashdot's first (*) asshole.
Too skinny, I suspect, for most of the nerds here. Try this:
(_*_)
Do they ever ask what Repetitive fawning crap goes here... means?
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.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Anyway, there was a page about emoticons, listing a bunch of variations on the smiley. It's quite amusing. I was going to put them all here, but the lameness filter isn't letting me, so I'll just post a few highlights to whet your appetite and look for a link (here's one; click Internet in the left frame then search the right frame for "smiley"):
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
"Books" and personal communications are different environments. Although I do (occasionally) use smileys it doesn't mean that I need to because I have no other way of expressing myself effectively. It simply means that for the particular communication in question I determine the smiley to be an effective method of quickly and easily clarifying meaning. While I could say "Just joking by the way!", a ";)" is just as effective.
Or perhaps I should compose all my correspondence in sonnet form, just to show I have an impressive "grasp of the written word".......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
There are some distinguished CMU profs like Touretzsky, Carbonell, and Thibadeau in those posts.
I'll bet that one guy with the joke post never thought that this would come back to haunt him two decades later.
May we never see th
I recall back in 1979 that smiley's and other emoticons were in use on Unix and VAX systems....geez, even Bank of America's internal network used them.
Amazing how many "first appeared" that are purported are just not true...
Smily is a vulger term, right up there with people who say 'lol' and 'rotfifjuadbiacm' or whatever the heck that means.
The Internet is generally stupid
Did anyone notice that the very next post after Fahlman's invented post moderation? (albeit self moderation) quoted here:
19-Sep-82 18:56 Jeff Shrager at CMU-10A 38521,03,9(6),9(9),1(5),0
Just signifying that a message is a joke is certainly not sufficient.
One can develop a taxonomy of bboard message types along several different
dimensions. Also, where a continuum is preferable to a taxonomy (such as
where humor value is at issue) one can similarly use a scale to indicate
where along that scale this message lies. Suppose that all dimensions are
refered to by a ten point scale (we'll use all integers here although one
can certainly imagine reals in the case of fine grain continuous scales).
Some dimensions will be bitwise encoded as well.
Here is a sample of a coding scheme:
COMMUNITY: (this is a binary scale with a bit position for
each department totalling about 32 bits)
TOPIC: (two digits 00-99)
(00) Political, (01) Scientific, (02) Computer, (03) Meta, etc
FLAME VALUE: (continuous 0.0-10.0)
HUMOR VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
BORDOM VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
INFORMATIONAL CONTENT: (-10.0 (for queries) to 10.0 (for their answers))
Note that some of these scales are purely according to the opinion
of the author. Thus, we provide, also, a confidence scale: to go along
with each continuous scale (to be enclosed in parens after the value).
Agreed. Humor in real life conversation is conveyed not only through words, but also through body language, tone, and context. In text, you have none of the first two, and the third can often be impaired.
/. or IM :-)
While we're at it, we should add a flashing "Applause" sign to the writers toolchest!
IOW: We should stop blatantly telling the reader how to feel, and rather improve the writing to convey the emotion. This is of course wrt real writing, rather than droning on
...the first set of THESE (.)(.) where seen on a computer screen! Spend $50 million on researching THAT, M$FT!
(Ironically enough, to make that "bodicon" appear correctly on
And one for the road ->
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
So much in most languages, certianly English, relies on tone. This is something that simply cannot be conveyed through text. In something like a novel you can take the time to rewrite things such that the language truly indicates what you mean to convey, and you also have teh benefit of speaking about a character's actions (eg. "And that was smart", Jim remarked with a smirk). With realtime communiactions you have no such advantages. YOu have to come up with your response quickly, and have little ability to comment on them. A simley is sucha device. YOu can indicate the general intended tone of a remark. I can think of many phrases that I would use that could mean many different things depending on how I said them. For example:
:) would let them know that I am just kidding and playing with them.
"Well you reall screwed that up."
Now if I said that in a jovial, joking, manner, it would mean that I'm kidding, you really didn't screw up that bad, I'm just harassing you. If I said that in a neutral, professional tone, it woul be a comment, that you did indeed mess something up. If I yelled that, it would eman that not only did you do it, but it pissed me off personally.
While I can't truly convery that in a qucik text message, smileys can help. If I just typed it as is, it would probably be intereprted in the neutral sense I spoke of, and the person would believe that I was really indicating that I believed they ahd sincerely screwed up. Adding a
Writing a letter (as people did in the olden days, or so I am told) is hardly the same as typing messages in ICQ, email or IRC. When one writes a letter, one has the time to carefully weigh the thrust of each sentence so that ones meaning isn't lost upon the reader. On line communication is often more like to spoken conversation rather than written communication. Real people don't speak like characters in a book. In normal conversation, people use half-sentences, they slur over bits of words, and most importantly people can see and gauge each other's emotions. Similarly, in on-line conversation, people use abbreviations and they make spelling mistakes that they don't care to correct. What is missing is facial expressions, and smileys fill that gap.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Franklin Loufrani, who is credited with creating the original smiley to indicate good news in some European newspapers in 1972. See more here.
He apparently has them trademarked in various contries and has threatened to defend the trademark" though I suspect it might be a bit late to do so in the UK after the acid house craze. (Incidentally, this article to provides a different explanation for the history of the smiley.)
See World Smile Corp if you want to use the trademark.
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.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
We've got bigger problem's to worry about.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
So now we know the name of the bastard who invented smilies. Bastard. Allows emotions to be conveyed in plain text, does it? People have been expressing emotions in plain text for millenia without any fucking colons and brackets tacked onto the end to show whether it's funny or not.
Stupid bastard.
So now we just need to know the bastard's address, so we can go round there and mete out some suitable Jay and Silent Bob style revenge on the bastard.
Next we'll track down and get medieval on the arses of those sub-literate fucks who spell everything like Prince song titles.
"Information wants to be paid"
My sister and I used to "type pictures" on my parents old suitcase typewriter. We made all sorts of pictures. I wish I still had some around.
comment directly in my journal
i have never seen any japanese people using them, i have only seen anime fans using them because they somewhat resemble anime faces.
I find it interesting that the upside-down smiley (-: was first seen less than 30 hours after the smiley's invention.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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:
i nd 0110B&L=ads-l&P=R4596
:) :(
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=
[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]
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Aaaahhhhhh! you created a 4-eyed monster! (See your subjectline)
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside
Most likely because a lot of the flamers and trolls never actually stop.
/* Anonymity isn't all it's cracked up to be. */
;-)
Who are you quoting?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
'Course like all else DOS, it was backwards.
Just imagine, in our day and age of intellectual property, copyrights and trademarks...if Jim had only protected his copyright to that little emoticon... He'd be a wealthy man, now wouldn't he? :-)
However, since he had the forethought not to do so, he has created something that has much a part of our daily lives as the air we breath and the cola we guzzle.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
THe biggest problem is that a lot of homor and communication is visual. The wry smile at the end, the slight raising of an eyebrow can change the tone completely of a dialogue.
A lot of people overuse smilies, but sometimes they are essential.
My own sense of humor is exceptionally deadpan and serious at times and sometimes people look at me in horor until they see the wink just as I am walking away. Or a conspiratorial glance and twitch of the corner of the mouth at a friend.
Like all text based communication (and to a certain extent telephone communication) there is a limit to how much can be conveyed withour prior knowedge of the individual involved.
Humor is always subjective and often subtle.
Working for the (other) man
Assholes can still be funny. Just look at Dennis Leary or Lewis Black.
A lot of times you'll rip into someone for the entertainment of others. You don't need a smiley for that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes, but Despair has threatened to sue (well, is -pretending- to threaten to sue as their site is parody) everyone on the Internet that uses the :-( face.
As we saw in the Felton case, pretending to threaten to sue doesn't mean anything.
I wish LOL wasn't so abused. Theoretically, it should mean "I am so amused, I actually made a noise" but I think it's been way watered-down, especially by people who use it to emphasize their own damn jokes, ala "You think you guys are gonna win the tourney? LOL!"...see, I don't think someone would actually laugh at that as they were writing. People use it to say "that's laughable" rather than "I'm actually laughing".
:-D , 'Course AIM et al have decide that's a big cheesy smile, not a laugh. Those pricks.
"HAHAHA" and "Heh!" kind of work, sort of.
Or a note like *audibly amused*.
I used to use
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
But in typing class in 1978, we would make all kinds 'pictures' using keys. Much to the frustration of our teacher.
I can gaurentee you we weren't the first.
OTOH qudos to the researcher that managed to dig this up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
(_*_)
goatse.cx ascii style
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.
:-) 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.
:-)
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
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.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Unless he has checked every possible source it is only the first known on-line smiley
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
.. and has anyone else been completely screwed by the htmlization of email leading to 'unrecognized tags' being dropped. so your tag at the end of an otherwise harsh-seeming sentence gets dropped, completely changing the meaning of the text.
I've taken to using { brackets to be on the safe side - as in {sarcasm} {/sarcasm} when i don't know what email client the recipient is using. yuk.
Porn truly is on the cutting edge of every technology!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The phrasing: "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.'"
Came from a Calvin and Hobbes strip.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA, God damn man that's so fucking funny. LOL".
If I find something funny online I usually will respond with "heh" or "hah" or "hahah" depending on the humor level. I'll only LOL if it's actually the truth.
I used to think "LOL" was beneath me, but I ran into problems when I was actually laughing out loud and wanted to tell people that. I felt like a moron saying "I'm actually laughing out loud man."
I would never type "ROTFL" unless, well, I was rolling on the floor laughing. Or had done so. Since that's never actualy happened in my whole life...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's their fault for using software that uses an HTML rendering engine to display email. :-P Then again, I've always used ":-)" and variants of it. I think I saw "<g>" only on GEnie...thought it ("<g>", that is) was ghey, so I didn't use it.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.