Last month marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the smiley emoticon => :-).
It was invented by Scott E. Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University. By 1982, the Internet had spread to major university computer science departments - still, an amazing 10 years away from going public. Among other things, students and staff could communicate via the Internet in an early version of today's BBS, and soon, like today, they discovered that something said in jest in text can easily be taken as being serious.
The discussion turned to ways of indicating a post is meant to be taken as a joke. Being computer scientists, things like preceding the post with an asterisk were suggested but, of course, the meaning of something like that would hardly be obvious.
Then Fahlman wrote, "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-). Read it sideways."
He let the conversation go and was shocked to soon find that everyone was now using his new symbol, and the rather obvious :-( too. It spread quickly through universities and, when the Internet went public, to the rest of us.
One of the things that is not often mentioned in this story, but that I find interesting, is that Fahlman and the rest hardly recognized the significance of what they had conceived until it spread to the general public a decade later. They went digging through the old data tapes (yes TAPES!) to find his post, and low and behold, there it was.
It's kind of a lesson to us all, the internet is forever. Be careful what you type. :-)
Anyway, to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to change the wallpaper on my laptop to Fahlman's post, as it may have appeared on someone's terminal in the early eighties. I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I made it instead. It isn't anything special, so feel free to steal it if you like.
Oh, and sorry about only one screen size.
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