Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog: Original message copy with smiley face

From the Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

CNET reported last week that after some digging through old backup tapes from Carnegie Mellon University, Mike Jones, a Microsoft researcher, has pretty solid evidence that the smiley face now central to e-mail and instant messages (for better or worse) was first introduced in 1982. As it happens, the first smiley face wasn't meant to show happiness, or sarcasm, but rather to indicate that something was a joke. (A gag about a mercury spill in an elevator didn't go over too well.) The first smiler, Scott Fahlman, had long been credited with the invention (as he was in a front-page Journal article from 1992), but no one could remember exactly when the note was written.

The full message string shows that Mr. Fahlman's smiley face was just one of several suggestions on how to indicate one was joshing -- ranging from an asterisk to a pound sign to an ampersand. (He invented the sad face in the same note.) There was a push from Gandalf fans for an apparently pre-existing joke symbol \__/ but it never got traction.

The actual date on Mr. Fahlman's posting was Sept. 19, 1982. So this coming Thursday, the smiley turns 20 years old. Happy birthday. Now all we have left to do is wait for the birthday of ROTFLMAO and other overly complicated acronyms.