Slashdot Log In
The Smiley Face Turns 25 :-)
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Sep 18, 2007 06:36 PM
from the heh dept.
from the heh dept.
klubar writes "Another milestone of online communications has been reached. The smiley turns 25, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman who says he was the first to use three keystrokes. '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.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Editors... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
"...I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world", Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement.
Well, haven't we all?
It's the absence of a smiley that differentiates academic discourse from the sort of things that are transmitted by chatting softwares, or leaked through editorial boardses. ;-)
Re:Editors... (Score:5, Funny)
I have NO idea what you are talking about!
now bite me!
oh, wait, I'm sorry, that was rude
forgive me?
yes? ALRIGHT!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Zonked (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
got :---) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You mean Smiley vs. Smiley Face? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's authorship was credited to the late Harvey Ball (who drew it in the 1960s). "Smiley" is in an ad in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 10 March 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. See for yourself. The ad is for the film LILI, with the "delightful" Leslie Caron. The "World Premiere Today" is at the Trans-Lux 52nd on Lexington. The film opened nationwide, and this ad ran in many newspapers.
Today
You'll laugh
You'll cry
You'll love
_Lili_
Parent
Re:You mean Smiley vs. Smiley Face? (Score:5, Funny)
You'll love (. )( .)
Here. Fixed that for you too ;)
Parent
Damn editors (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not "25" - it's "24 and a smiley" (Score:2)
Like people who are 29 for a long time, or 39 for a long time, etc.
It was a joke, but I didn't smile. It was lame :-O
Guys... we get older... (Score:3, Funny)
Right up until the time I drop dead.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Re:Guys... we get older... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
*grabs tomato and points at Zonk* >;-)
24? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know we were using these on a message board in 1979-1980 at a community college in Michigan prior to then. I might even be able to dig some of it up as I printed off a lot of messages back then and may still have them in an old computer paper box.
Rather odd anyone would lay a claim to inventing it. I'm certain the concept dates further back to teletypes and such.
Ah well, anything to start a ruckus on
(c:
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
That's nothing. The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls were using them back then!
Re:24? (Score:5, Funny)
And in recent new today a new Hieroglyph has been discovered with the Great Pyramid of Giza. The symbol appears to consist of two vertically adjacent circles and a single curve segment whose curvature is oriented such that the 2 circles appear to be near the center of the circle that would be formed were the curve's slope extended out. Our man on the scene has provided us with a crude sketch of this Hieroglyph, whose meaning is unknown but which is suspected to be related to one of the primary emotions humans have experienced since the dawn of time.
: ) Note how the segment appears to be a piece of a general circle center on the 2 dots. Why a segment of a circle was chosen,
^ Rather than the full circle itself, and why it is centered on the dots, is currently unknown
Also Note how the two circles are placed one directly over the other. Most other Hieroglyphs have utilized slight angles, generally sloping inwards, so this discovery may help understand a great many things that are currently unknown about Egyptian society
This has been Faux News' Archeology Department. Stay tuned for the weather.
Parent
The emoticon is dead... long live XML! (Score:5, Funny)
Thankfully, we no longer need to use this outdated technology of "emoticons" to denote humorous sentiments in email and online postings. Some have historically proposed the use of a "sarcasm" tag littered among ordinary text to convey the sarcastic emotion more accurately. I propose going one step further, and am proposing the Humour-XML standard, which will provide a much richer way to fully denote sentiments on the web. For instance, consider the sarcastic exprssion:
I'll get right on thatEven in this simple expression, the smiley face does not convey enough information to the reader to properly discern the mood of the poster. It is left ambiguous whether the poster is completely sarcastic, and will not "get right on that", or if the poster was merely in a humorous mood and implying that they will "get right on that" in a cheerful way. This failure to communicate is costing the American economy untold billions in lost productivity, rivaling that of "sick days" and movie piracy. The following is a rough draft of an XML standard I am proposing to completely eliminate our dependence on this obsolete form of communication.
I propose a full XML schema devoted to conveying emotion in email, web postings, and Usenet "flame" messages. For instance, the previous message would be written in Humour-XML as:
<?xml version="1.0"?> />
<posting>
<message mood="sarcastic" level="highly"> I'll get right on that <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)"
</message>
</posting>
The message now contains no ambiguities — the reader understands that the poster is "highly sarcastic" , and does not actually intend to "get right on that"
The Humour-XML schema provides numerous benefits to users such as: enhanced text-to-speech renderings of postings (the speaker's voice could convey emotion, etc.), backwards compatibility with obsolete emoticons, UTF-8 support, building the Semantic Web from the ground up, and other benefits too numerous to enumerate here. Without extolling the virtues of this fantastic language too greatly, I'll touch on one more gold mine of usability: using XSLT [wikipedia.org] to transfrom Humour-XML to other forms, such as emoticon-text or even SVG graphics. For instance, we can define an XSLT stylesheet like so:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
/> </xsl:text>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="posting">
<emoticon_text> <xsl:apply-templates/> </emoticon_text>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="message">
<xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates> </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="message">
<xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="symbol"
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The example XSLT spreadsheet provided here should provide posters eager to try this amazing technology a head-start. I am in the process of carefully constructing a DTD for Humour-XML, as well as several more very useful XSLT stylesheets. I hereby disclaim all patents on said technology, and promise that Humour-XML is free for the world to use royalty-free, forever.
Parent
Re:The emoticon is dead... long live XML! (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like we're going to have another standards battle on our hands
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As odd as, say, someone keeping printouts of 25+ year old conversations from community college message boards? ;)
We had some great discussions. We experience flame-wars (gun control as one I recall vividly), angry crapflooders, ALL CAPS, etc. Pretty well everything you see now came about the moment you threw a VT52 terminal and message system at people through which they could chat with anonymity. Heck, we even had cyber stalkers, those who wanted to find out who was using a certain name on the syste
Re:24? (Score:5, Funny)
nobody knows YOU INSENSATIVE CLOD!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Graphical smilies suck (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't even get into how annoying it is when it changes part of your text that isn't a smiley into a smiley only because it detects the text. It is like how some MMORPGS do ***umption and stuff.
Re:Graphical smilies suck (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Graphical smilies suck (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, doesn't that make you want to ******inate someone?
Burninate?
Parent
Re:Graphical smilies suck (Score:4, Funny)
(And people don't typically capitalize all the letters in his name. Just a heads-up.)
Parent
Futurama? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
now bow before you evil smiley overlord >:-|
(.)(.)
^emoticons, making perl regex NSFW for 24 years!
Re: (Score:2)
/ / ( . Y . ) \ \
bam. that's better, but the spacing needs work.
25 years ago... (Score:5, Funny)
Spam will be 20 soon. I claim first use, Nov 1987. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://beyond.jeannettecezanne.com/2007/08/05/the-origins-of-spam/ [jeannettecezanne.com]
Here's the original posting.
http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/msg/b7ce97a77276e16f?q=ken+weaverling+spam+usenet+first&hl=en&rnum=1 [google.com] Paul
The only thing I see wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the guy is full of shit in making such a claim. ASCII Art, including the use of emoticons, have been around a lot longer than his first use of it. To claim he was the first and/or created the idea is insane.
I'm sorry, but I grew up in the 300 baud modem, emoticon existing and using days that predate his claim by over half a decade.
Re:The only thing I see wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The only thing I see wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The only thing I see wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Um, look at the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, look at the article. (Score:5, Funny)
(.Y.) <-- tits
(_._) <-- ass
Parent
A weird, possibly local, BBS lingo (Score:5, Interesting)
(g) - grin
(bg) - big grin
(vbg) - very big grin
I wonder if it was just a local thing, or if anyone else used to use that too.
The original thread... (Score:4, Informative)
---------------
Original Bboard Thread in which
Here is the original message posted by Scott Fahlman on 19 September, 1982:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman
From: Scott E Fahlman
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 entire thread is reproduced below. We didn't have formal newsgroup threads in those days, but these are all the messages that mention the need for a joke marker or that use the
This was retrieved from the spice vax oct-82 backup tape by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002. The period covered is 16 September 1982 through 21 October 1982.
Credits: Here is the account by Mike Jones describing how this ancient post was retrieved. It's an impressive piece of digital archeology, with many contributors. I am grateful to Mike, to Jeff Baird, and to all the others who played a role in this effort. It is great that we can view this bit of Internet history once again.
Many people were involved in this computing archaeology success story. I (Mike Jones) kicked off the effort in February 2002 by looking through some old bboard program (Bags) sources, figuring out the filename that the post would likely be found under (/usr/cmu/lib/bb/general.bb), and asking Howard Wactlar, the former CMU SCS facilities director, whether the file could still be restored. Scott Fahlman provided data narrowing the probable span of time during which the post was made. Howard and Bob Cosgrove, the current director, determined that backup tapes from that period (1981-1983) still existed and asked Jeff Baird of the facilities staff to try to find and restore the post. Dave Livingston of facilities located a working 9- track tape drive and a machine to use it on. Kirk Berthold and Michael Riley in CS operations managed retrieving tapes from off-site archival storage. Grad student Dan Pelleg's FreeBSD machine was used to read the 4.1BSD dump format tapes using a compatibility mode in the restore program. (Later in the effort a NetBSD machine was used to do the same thing.) Dale Moore looked for the post on Tops-20 backup tapes from CMU-20C. But by all accounts, Jeff Baird should get most of the credit for doing the hard work of locating and retrieving the data. He kept asking for more tapes, reading those that could still be read, narrowing the date range, and sticking with it until the post was found. Thanks all for your efforts to restore this part of computing history, and especially, thanks Jeff!
Note: There apparently were a few posts prior to 16 September (not on the tape that was retrieved) that posed various physics questions about what would happen to various objects in an elevator if you cut the cable. Given the quality of the elevators in Wean Hall (then and now), this was more than idle speculation.
Apparently someone had posed the problem of what would happen to a helium balloon in free-fall, someone else had asked about pigeons flying around in the falling elevator, and someone had then asked what would happen if the birds were breathing the helium...
16-Sep-82 11:51 James Wright at CMU-780D Related question
Of equal interest is how the birds cheeping will
sound after they have inhaled the Helium.
=
16-Sep-82 12:09 Neil Swartz at CMU-750R Pigeon type question
This question does not involve pigeons, but is similar:
There is a lit candle in an elevator mounted on a bracket attached to
the middle of one wall (say, 2" from the wall). A drop of mercury
is on the floor. The cable snaps and the elevator falls.
What happens to the candle and the mercury?
You're kidding, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because it's on the computer, it must be new!
I know I saw them in a military communications in '84 during transatlantic tests. 2 people, many hours away really,really tired tend to get punchy...I wonder this is the person I was communicating with? That would be weird!
Prior Art? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://maul.deepsky.com/~merovech/smiley.html [deepsky.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For Your Reference (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall/smileys.html [umd.edu]
I looked up where the Japanese smiley came from (Score:5, Interesting)
http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/09/19/turns-25-but-how-old-are-japanese-emoticons/ [whatjapanthinks.com]
So as not to link whore (but karma whore instead...), here goes:
You may have heard the news that 25 years ago on the 19th of October 1982, there was the first recorded use of western smileys on usenet. However, that got me wondering as to how old horizontal Japanese emoticons were. With a little investigation, I came across this Japanese page on the evolution of smiley marks in Japan. I'll now present a summary translation of this history of the Japanese emoticon.
First up is a nuclear scientist claiming to have invented (~_~) and others round about the same time as ASCII Net (a Japanese online service) started on the first of May 1985, although he says he wasn't the first, he was just following the patterns of others.
Next up was someone claiming that when he attended Hokkaido University the first Japanese emoticon he saw was from Master Koala with (^O^) in fj.jokes, inspiring him to invent the following:
(^.^) - laughing
(;.;) - crying
(-.-) - sleeping, shocked
(_ _) - apologising, lowering one's head
; - sweat mark, eg (^.^;)
* - red-faced, eg *^.^*
These were coined between May and July of 1988 and used on JUNET, the Japanese University Network.
Now, we get to a usenet post from January 13 1998, indirectly archived by Google Groups (but with broken encoding). In the message we can see the following marks:
(^O^) - Master Koala smiling
(-O-) - Master Koala sleeping
(*O*) - Master Koala shocked
(@O@) - Master Koala looking sideways
(=O=) - Master Koala squinting through narrowed eyes
(>O<) - Master Koala surprised
(dOb) - Master Koala neutral
Now we get a very interesting post, suggesting that the classic (^_^) was invented in Japan, but perhaps not by a Japanese. A Kim Tong Ho claims that in the first half of 1986 he signed posts to ASCII Net with the above-mentioned emoticon, with one example from 20th of June 1986. However, he doesn't have confidence to claim to be the very first person to come up with a Japanese emoticon that doesn't require head-tilting to read. Around the same time a person with the handle 'binbou' (the nuclear scientist mentioned above) used (~_~), but as to who was first, it is rather difficult to say.
So, there we have it; the Japanese emoticon is at least 21 years and a few months old, perhaps even 22 and a bit years old.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
6:45:57... 6:45:58... 6:45:59...
Re:The Cheer (Score:5, Funny)
KUPO!!!
Parent
Re:Math error (Score:4, Funny)
Cheers,
Dave
Parent
Re:2007-1982 = 25 (Score:4, Funny)
PROTIP: Nobody cares.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
OGC