How the online smiley, 20 today, began
Misunderstood joke led to idea for symbol
By Rachel Ross
Technology Reporter
http://www.thestar.com/NA...8793972154



Today there's reason to smile.

It's the 20th anniversary of the sideways smiley face, now a ubiquitous feature of online communications.

The symbol was first proposed on Sept. 19, 1982, by artificial intelligence researcher Scott Fahlman as a means of designating jokes. The exact anniversary of the smiley was discovered earlier this month on a backup tape of old messages from Carnegie Mellon University's online bulletin board.

"Until my original message was rediscovered, less than a week ago, we didn't know the exact date on which the smiley was created," Fahlman, now a researcher for IBM Corp., said in an e-mail interview. "So we haven't had time to plan any big celebration. My personal celebration will just be to smile a lot on Thursday."

It was a series of miscommunications that first inspired the sideways smiley. Fahlman and his fellow researchers at Carnegie Mellon were telling a few jokes with other researchers on the computer science bulletin board when someone mistook a joke about an elevator accident as a serious safety warning.

That got them to thinking: perhaps they should designate all jokes with a special character.

"How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?" suggested Carnegie Mellon researcher Anthony Stentz in the online bulletin board. "We could even use *% for jokes that are so bad, they're funny."

Another participant on the bulletin board, Keith Wright, thought the ampersand should be used to indicate all humorous messages. According to Wright's bulletin board posting, he thought the character itself looked funny, "like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter."

But it was Fahlman's sideways smiley that really took off.

When he first suggested the colon-dash-bracket combination on the bulletin board, Fahlman noted that given the amount of humorous content they were writing, "it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes."

For this, he proposed yet another series of characters: the frowney.

It only took a few months for the idea to spread and variants of the sideways smiley and frowney faces to appear, including symbols for everyone from the Pope to Santa Claus.

On his personal Web site, Fahlman admits that it's possible the smiley was used by Teletype operators "in the old days," though he hasn't seen any examples.

"The smiley idea may have appeared and disappeared a few times before my 1982 post," Fahlman writes on his Web site, "but it is pretty clear from the timing that my suggestion was the one that finally took hold, spread around the world, and spawned thousands of variations."

Fahlman said he thinks the symbols, now known as emoticons, are still so popular today because of their ease of use, utility and fun.

"These days we can include a whole smiling photo in a message if we want to, or at least one of those special smiling symbols that some programs use," he said.

"But I think people enjoy the fact that you can convey your mood in a clever way with just three standard characters on the keyboard."

cool info Aerogram.

Haaappy birthday to
Happy birthday to
Happy biiirthay, Dear
Happy birthday to you!!!

answers; "I DO NOT CELBRATE BIRTHDAYS"

rock on, smiley.