Today is birthday of smiley icon
Scott Fahlman posted an electronic message at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982. It was the first smiley emoticon or joke marker, and since then it has become ingrained in the modern chat.
Scott Fahlman, one of the computer administrators at Carnegie Mellon University, posted this famous message to a computer-science department bulletin board:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman
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:
:-(
Thus by posting this message with the ASCII-based emoticon (the words, emotion and icon combined), Fahlman became the first person to make that mark, literally. Since then, hundreds of emoticons have sprouted but every one of them is based on this first smiley icon :-).
Though he was the first one in the computer field to do so, others had used this much earlier in the mid-19th century, when a few used Morse code symbols to convey the same emotion.
In 1881, the emoticon had appeared in one of the magazines called Puck, an American satirical magazine. Ambrose Bierce suggested to Puck using the following characters, -- __/ --, which he called "snigger point" to convey jocularity or irony.
But Fahlman is the one officially credited with the smiley emoticon. Fahlman said he introduced this after seeing plenty of arguments between the members in the bulletin boards, who couldn’t differentiate the message as a joke or a serious one.
To remedy this problem he suggested using :-) or :-(.