Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Smiley Face Turns 25 :-)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the heh dept.

klubar writes "Another milestone of online communications has been reached. The smiley turns 25, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman who says he was the first to use three keystrokes. 'Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.'"

8 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Damn editors by apollosfire · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ignore the headline, as the summary and article both state - it's 25!

  2. Um, look at the article. by Higaran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The article is about how the smiley face is used for humorus purposed, so how many geeks missed that the title was actually a joke, looks like just about everyone so far. Wow I don't know if I should be happy that I got it, or terrified that I did. Well anyways. (.) (.) V

  3. Teletypes by Miykayl · · Score: 2, Insightful


    Yes... That "Old School" porn...

    Pinup girls printed in 80-columns of delicious Courier(ish) typeface.

    I would be stunned if smiley faces were not in use to some degree in the 70's, or even the late 60's, when teletypes (with 110-baud modems) were how most news services sent and received news...

    They had the nice pin-up girls...

    And, what work it must have been to make ACII art back in the day, before video-card drivers had ASCII-effect filters...

    Sheesh!

  4. Re:Prior Art? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Coincidental occurrence of :) does not make a smiley, at least in the sense that we are accustomed to. Smiley might be older that 25 & could be even older than 18th century book you linked to. but the :) in that book is not a smiley.

  5. Re:Graphical smilies suck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Use backwards smilies. (:

    Advantages:

    1. They are not picked up by forums/IM programs and replaced with an annoying graphic.
    2. They look down at the sentence they apply to.
    3. There are no double chins when a smiley preceeds a closing bracket (Like this :-))
    4. Proper noses (c:

  6. Re:Editors... by dld121 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is bogus... They were using "smiley" face symbols long before we used them on computers. "Teletype" - used these many many years before the 1980s.

  7. And sarcasm... by dontspitconfetti · · Score: 2, Insightful

    is still just as impossible to convey over the internet.

  8. got :---) by OrangeTide · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've only been on the net since 94. Still only used :) but I was mainly IRCing back then and not on the newsgroups. I suspect each "scene" had their own way of doing things.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire