It would only seem fitting for today’s Pittsburgh to be the birthplace of a smiley face. For Pittsburgh of 1982, not so much. There was simply not much to smile about in the city with ailing economy.
Yet it was in the seclusion of CMU’s computer science lab, in Sept. 1982, that :-) saw the light of day or, to put it more precisely, the light of the screen. Scott E. Fahlman’s screen.
Fahlman was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and was browsing though Computer Science’s online bulletin board, widely know as ‘bboards.’ These bboards were important mechanism in the department, as Fahlman remembers, where faculty, staff and students could discuss things.
“Many of the posts were serious,” Fahlman says, “talk announcements, requests for information, and things like “I’ve just found a ring in the fifth-floor men’s room. Who does it belong to?” Other posts discussed topics of general interest, ranging from politics to abortion to campus parking to keyboard layout (in increasing order of passion). Even in those days, extended “flame wars” were common.
Some of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor), Fehlman writes. “The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.”
The problem inspired lots of potential solutions. People started pitching in ideas for “joke markers” as they call these things. These “joke marketers” were supposed to serve as cues for a reader to understand the intent of the writer, without audio or video.
So Fahlman suggested :-)
In the same post, he also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger. This is what his message was:
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
:-(
That’s the creation story of the harbinger of emoticons — the Smiley/Frowny Face. You see them so often these days in your text messages, snap chats, Facebook posts and others — it looks so natural and native to these platforms. It’s hard to believe that it’s over 20 years older than Facebook.
And although Fahlman appreciates how emoticons are becoming more colorful and generally fancier these days, he still prefers the original.
