Smiley face turns 25, he can cry if he wants to...:-)

by ryan | September 18, 2007 at 01:54 pm

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But he won't, after all, he's a smiley face. What are now known as emoticons and come if various graphic forms had a humble start as three boring grammatical symbols :-). The inventor of the now infamous emoticonused for the first time in a chat room on this day 25 years ago.

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.
"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman.
"Read it sideways."

The last line perhaps being the most important, "read it sideways".
The emoticon was hailed as a great way to express the unexpressbile or a way for techies to get even lazier.

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.