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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).
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.
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'
...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
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.
Lighten the fuck up. :-)
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
2664
Once upon a time, people didn't have lowercase and so could not use uppercase for emphasis or to mark the start of a sentence.
Once upon a time, people didn't write spaces between words in their text.
Once upon a time, people didn't have vowels to help distinguish words.
Once upon a time, people didn't have question marks or exclamation points to indicate interrogatives or imperatives.
Get over it. "The tone of their writing" is simply too unreliable a mechanism for conveying in print what body language does for us in person. Why is the smiley any more objectionable as punctuation than, say, the question mark?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
"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
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.
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.
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!
According to Fahlman's own page on the subject, there is the possibility that the smiley symbol was used by teletype operators way back in the day. However, there is no hard evidence of this occurring, and no web pages document it. As we all know, if a point has no web page supporting it, it can't be true. :-)
For more information, click here.
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
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
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
"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
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
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.
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
/* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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