Celebrating 26 Years of Winky Smiley Winky!

This is the man who invented the ASCII-based emoticon, on a computer science BBS at Carnegie Mellon 26 years ago!

"the modern emoticon does trace its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading 'lengthy diatribes' from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post -- which is probably what 'given current trends' refers to in his own, now-famous missive. To remedy this, Fahlman suggested using :-) and :-( to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature."

Here is the September 1982 BBS post where he proposed the smiley emoticon:

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

:-(

Awesome!