Happy 25th Birthday, Smiley Emoticon

In 1982, computers were rudimentary, only the main colleges had computers and also were limited to certain departments and faculty. There was a bulletin board system, just like the social networks, but limited to the college or department. The users used to post messages on a variety of topics, daily news, goings on near campus, lost and found items, meetings announcements, groups, etc. However, there used to be lot of bickerings in the bulletin boards, many used to misinterpret the messages (a humorous message was misinterpreted as serious and vice versa) and they used to be very vocal and led to a lot of misunderstandings among them.

The committee in the bulletin board decided to do something about it, everyone suggested ideas to convey the emotions better in the messages. But no one came up with a good idea until Professor Scott Fahlman proposed a smiley face :-), which implies that the message written is a joke and a reverse sign :-( to indicate the message is a bad one, to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously. Though the reverse smiley symbol quickly became a sign to imply sadness, displeasure, frustration, or anger.

It is shown in the image below:

Soon after, every university started to follow this proposal and it spread worldwide. It was popularized in the Yahoo, MSN messengers initally, and now there are 100s of variations of this emoticon sign. Some used this smiley sign either with a hyphen or without it, but both meant the same.

When Fahlman announced that he discovered the smiley sign first, no one believed him, so he tried to get the original data. But since it was stored in tapes and not stored like the servers, it wasn’t easy for him to prove initially. He pressed on the search and with the help of the staff; he was able to dig out the first message shown above.

Thanks to Professor Fahlman, the Messenger talk became life like with the smiley emoticons, now there are more than 100 emoticons showing different human emotions. Now the messenger senses the above character signs and converts them to the popular round smiley face, but without the original smiley face, it wouldn’t have become prominent. Cheers to Smiley emoticon :-).