The First Smiley :-)

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday September 12, 2002 @02:31PM from the cave-paintings-be-damned dept.

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.

16 of 462 comments (clear)

:-( (pad) by undeg+chwech · 2002-09-12 14:33 · Score: 5, Funny

Nostalgia makes me sad :-(
Usenet and Emoticons by messiertom · 2002-09-12 14:37 · Score: 5, Informative

Here's a link to a usenet posting describing the use of emoticons/smilies (it references Fahlmen).
may god forgive him for what he has unleashed by Jamie+Zawinski · 2002-09-12 14:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
1. Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed by gilroy · 2002-09-12 14:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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: :)
  
  --
  The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
2. Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed by gilroy · 2002-09-12 14:47 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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?
  
  --
  The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Strange. by neksys · 2002-09-12 14:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
And I've made it my mission... by nakaduct · 2002-09-12 14:41 · Score: 5, Funny

To live to see the last.
1. Re:And I've made it my mission... by pla · 2002-09-12 15:32 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Ah, should I address you as Mr. Rosen, or Mr. Valenti?
Geek & Naming Conventions by Myriad · 2002-09-12 14:42 · Score: 5, Funny

Why is it that for things like this many geeks will automatically think of the same name? Ie, way back when I first saw a :) (ah BBS days) I got its meaning and thought of it as a "smiley". Quickly I found out that was what people called it. This kind of thing happens to most geeks I know.
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'
Uh oh... by phillymjs · 2002-09-12 14:45 · Score: 5, Funny

...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
Re:First smiley? by joshua404 · 2002-09-12 14:52 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Lighten the fuck up. :-)
Re:Leftists of the world - get angry. by IIRCAFAIKIANAL · 2002-09-12 15:13 · Score: 5, Funny

The backwards ones confuse me - i mean, what the hell is this?

>:{

since ppl started doing them upside down, the complicated ones become unreadable

someone sorta said this, but maybe we need an RFC or a smiley standards (someone email w3 quick!)

--
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Precursor to smiley in 1973 by Broccolist · 2002-09-12 15:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Leftists of the world - get angry. by mosch · 2002-09-12 15:35 · Score: 5, Funny

)-: damn you, you directionalist bastard.
Re:Another birth? by Bonker · 2002-09-12 15:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

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!
Re:Hoax?? by peterb · 2002-09-13 03:21 · Score: 5, Informative

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.