Computer scientist Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman:-)
From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose… 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:
:-(
With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (emotion + icon) have sprung scores of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message, and instant-message correspondence the world over.
Fahlman was not the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested what he called a snigger point:
to convey jocularity or irony. Baltimore’s Sunday Sun suggested a tongue-in-cheek sideways character in 1967.
But none of those caught on. The Internet emoticon truly traces its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” on the message board from people who had failed to get the joke or sarcasm in a particular post.
Fahlman’s original post was lost for a couple of decades and then retrieved from an old backup tape, thus cementing his claim of priority.—TL