September 22nd, 2008

Scott Fahlman: The Father and Inventor of Smiley

Posted by Matt | Discussion: Leave a comment »

Filed under Factoids + Interesting + Internet

Remember :-) and :-( sideways smiley symbols? I bet you do!

The use of :-) and :-( was first proposed by Scott Fahlman, a Research Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

This was back in 1982… and then online bulletin boards or “bboards” are widely used across the Computer Science community. It was like the phenomenon of blogs nowadays.

The Use of :-) and :-( Proposed

Here is the original message posted by Scott Fahlman on 19 September, 1982:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

:-) and :-( Are Older Than Me!

This was 26 years ago that Scott Fahlman proposed the use of :-) and :-( which he thought would help people on message boards to distinguish serious posts from jokes. Hah, those smilies are older than me!

The original message board post from which these smilies (symbols) originated was posted on September 19, 1982. It was then retrieved in 2002 by a team of computer specialists seeking to validate the claim.

More Info…

You can read the original post where he suggested it at:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

Do check out this link below for more details:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm