Happy 25th Birthday Sideways Smiley Face :-)!!
On September 19, 1982 :-) was born. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman figured out a way to comunicate when someone was "just joking". In a rare case of digital archeology the first sideways smiley face was resurrected from a crusty old bulletin board. Back then there may have been no more the a thousand people or so on the Internet.
The World Wide Web was some fifteen years away. Blogs, not even imagined...
Here is that BBoard message:
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
:-(
The graphic smiley emoticon was a product of the early sixties. But that's another story.
Happy Birthday, :-) !!