The Emoticon Turns 25

Not only is tomorrow NTLAPD, it is also the 25th birthday of the smiley emoticon.  A professor at Carnegie Mellon claims that he invented it. 

Emoticons- a blessing or a nuisance?

From the AP here:

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. 🙂 Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.
 
To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc. carries a $500 cash prize.

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

“I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways.”

I don’t know whether or not to thank Fahlman or not.  Sure, it helps to understand nuances in language written on the internet, but seeing little smileys all the time is annoying too.

So they are giving out a cash prize for stuff like this?  What’s next, a prize for YTMND?