Scott Fahlman Proposes :-)

SEP 19 1982 · 11:44

Smiling eyes, blinking mouth. Scott Fahlman's :-) gets a moving descendant decades later. Place: Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science bboard, Pittsburgh Figures: Scott Fahlman, research professor · the CMU CS faculty and graduate students reading the cs.general bboard The CMU computer science department runs an internal bulletin-board system. Recent threads have been getting derailed because nobody can tell which posts are jokes. On 19 September 1982 at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts a 19-line message proposing a solution. The full text: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 post is read by a few dozen CMU researchers. It propagates from CMU to Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and the early ARPAnet within months. By the late 1980s the emoticon is a standard component of email and Usenet etiquette. Video: Scott Fahlman, in his own words, on the 11:44 a.m. CMU bulletin-board post that proposed :-) in 1982.