Scott Fahlman Proposes :-)

1982

Date: 19 September 1982 · Place: Carnegie Mellon University CS bboard, Pittsburgh · Figures: Scott E. Fahlman, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon · Tags: Emoticon, Visual Primitive, BBoard 01. 11:44 AM On A Tuesday On 19 September 1982 at 11:44 AM, Scott Fahlman posts to the CMU computer science department bulletin board with a modest proposal. A thread about elevator physics has gone sideways because nobody can tell which messages are jokes. Fahlman suggests :-) as a joke marker and :-( for the opposite. The post is recovered in 2002 from a backup tape after twenty years of being thought lost. The original survives as a flat text file with the timestamp intact. "I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." — Scott Fahlman, CMU CS bboard, 19 September 1982 02. The First Visual Primitive The smiley escapes Carnegie Mellon within weeks via ARPANET gateways, hits Usenet by 1983, and is universal by the time the web exists. It is the first widely-adopted visual element in text-only communication, a tiny ASCII glyph that does what a body would do if a body were present. Every emoji on every phone in 2026 descends from these three characters. Fahlman, asked about emoji decades later, said he prefers his original because it requires effort to decode and reward to recognize. Sources • Scott Fahlman, 'Smiley Lore :-)' (CMU faculty page) • Mike Jones, recovery of the original 1982 post (Microsoft Research, September 2002) • The New York Times, 'A Universal Symbol, in Need of Marketing' (29 September 2007)