The First Smiley :-) 469
An anonymous reader points to this excellent bit of online archaeology -- Mike Jones' effort to find the first online smiley. A bit from the site: "After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x)." Interesting methodology and a lot of work went into the search -- shades of the Dead Media Project.
Surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it's just my cynical nature, but it's hard to imagine that emoticons as we know them weren't thrown around amongst colleagues in academia way before this.
At any rate, I'll sleep better now knowing...
With a face like that... (Score:2, Interesting)
Looks like a happy guy, how appropriate.
Ascii Galore (Score:2, Interesting)
[asciimation.co.nz]
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/
I think this is really cool. I wonder if there is a game version.
More Info (Score:4, Interesting)
"Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning."
"This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various "joke markers" were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence
Smiley Lore [cmu.edu]
Re:Another birth? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my father-in-law's favorite war stories was about his stint as a communications officer at a U.S. base in South Korea during the Veitnam war. At one point a good buddy in the U.S. sent him and his fellows a fairly high resolution black and white version of Playboy's Miss October 71... via teletype. The image had to be stapled together from multiple teletype sheets (4 feet wide and 6 feet long, I think he said) and viewed from several feet away before the print characters were recognizable as a female figure.
It has been brought to my attention... (Score:2, Interesting)
Simply put, if your website is smiley-heavy, you can achieve up to a 33% reduction in bandwidth costs simply by removing the nose from your smiley
OK, that's my contribution to Ancient Geek studies over with...
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
How about the first use of "flame on"/"flame off" (Score:4, Interesting)
But one thing I would like to find that I dimly remember is the first use (on Arpanet mailing lists in the late 70s) of the Johnny Storm "Flame On!" when getting angry in a posting.
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed (Score:2, Interesting)
A book takes many months to write. It is thought out, edited and (usually)long.
On the other hand, we are having a conversation. If we were face to face, I might move my hands, make facial expressions and change tones. Emoticoms are the online forum equivilent of such :p
Re:1970s and earlier probably (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. Unlike you, I don't recall as specificly when I first saw smileys, but there were so many BBSes whose messages are lost, and some of those BBSes had live chat. DARPAnet likely had its share of college chatters. (I wasn't even familiar with TTY's except I thought they were just for the deaf.) It's incredibly pompous for this guy to think he found the first smiley and for the other guy to claim he invented it.
The way I see it, anything I can think of or do has already been thought of and done long before I was born. Okay, advancing technology allows a few new "first"s, but they are infinitesimally rare, and somebody thought of it before you, anyway.
The only interesting thing I found about this article is the obsolescence of the data storage, but that's a horse than been beaten a few times before. At least now we have CDs, and those will last us for the next few hundred years.
By the way, I was very anti-smiley for YEARS. I think I had been using BBSes and the internet for 16 years before I finally sold my soul and used a smiley. (I believe I used <sigh> and similar angle-bracketed expressions, but not smileys.) It's too late for me, but you can still be saved.
Sorry Charlie (Score:2, Interesting)
Amazing how many "first appeared" that are purported are just not true...
Re:Leftists of the world - get angry. (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot invented in the same thread (Score:2, Interesting)
19-Sep-82 18:56 Jeff Shrager at CMU-10A 38521,03,9(6),9(9),1(5),0
Just signifying that a message is a joke is certainly not sufficient.
One can develop a taxonomy of bboard message types along several different
dimensions. Also, where a continuum is preferable to a taxonomy (such as
where humor value is at issue) one can similarly use a scale to indicate
where along that scale this message lies. Suppose that all dimensions are
refered to by a ten point scale (we'll use all integers here although one
can certainly imagine reals in the case of fine grain continuous scales).
Some dimensions will be bitwise encoded as well.
Here is a sample of a coding scheme:
COMMUNITY: (this is a binary scale with a bit position for
each department totalling about 32 bits)
TOPIC: (two digits 00-99)
(00) Political, (01) Scientific, (02) Computer, (03) Meta, etc
FLAME VALUE: (continuous 0.0-10.0)
HUMOR VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
BORDOM VALUE: (0.0-10.0)
INFORMATIONAL CONTENT: (-10.0 (for queries) to 10.0 (for their answers))
Note that some of these scales are purely according to the opinion
of the author. Thus, we provide, also, a confidence scale: to go along
with each continuous scale (to be enclosed in parens after the value).
Now that they've dug up this post... (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope they're saving all the posts around it-- not just that thread, but all the backup tapes. It's hard to know what will become worth knowing in a few decades' time-- I doubt anyone would have thought that Fahlman's post would be significant twenty years on.
I'm sure Google would take them. They've got so much old stuff [google.com] already, and they already archive significant [google.com] amounts [google.com] of [google.com] non-news-based [google.com] discussion [google.com].
Ealier online smileys are known: MacKenzie, Apr79 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:1970s and earlier probably (Score:2, Interesting)
BBS scene in 1981 from the ARPAnet, and while
they were new to local Seattle BBS users isolated
from the ARPAnet, they were old hat nationally at
that point.
Anyone seriously looking for the first smiley
should at minimum search the SF-LOVERS archives.
It is reputedly the first big ARPAnet mailing
list, and was certainly one of them. I believe
it started about 1975+-2 years; I was on it on
and off in the late 70s. I would be amazed if
its archives didn't show lots of smileys predating
1982. 1982 was when I got sick of ARPAnet and
took a half-decade vacation from it.
Smileys were in use as early as early 1970s (Score:1, Interesting)
On PLATO, one created emoticons by taking advantage of the SHIFT-space capability. Whenever you pressed SHIFT-space, the cursor moved back exactly one space. You could then type over the previous character. Combinations of certain characters led to all kinds of faces, smileys, beer glasses, you name it.
To see some of these examples, go to www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html [platopeople.com].
- Brian Dear
Working on a book on the history of PLATO
Back when I was a kid... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah.
Just because it's possible to do things in a older, harder way, doesn't mean they should be done this way. To paraphrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," doesn't mean "If it works, don't improve it."
Here's what's more or less a mathematical proof of why you'd be retarded not to use smilies:
In information theory, information is defined as uncertainty. The more possible messages that can be received, the more information one of them carries. This means that if you are sending a stream of bits (ones and zeroes, like computers use), you'd have to send many, many bits to achieve the same level of information density as if you were sending roman charachters, of which there are 26. We humans typically communicate using words, of which we have thousands, which we represent with strings of 26 unique letters and some punctuation marks. The word "complimentary" carries much more information to its recipient than any one letter, say, "f", simply because there are too few letters for one of them to carry such a specialized meaning. As such, if we can take the formerly meaningless string
Think of '80s mallrat bimbos. They only had 3 words: "like", "y'know", and "whatever". Remember how many of these they had to string together to get meaning out of them? "Like, y'know, like, whatever, y'know?"
Interestingly, the same argument can be used to show that it's retarded to outlaw words like fuck, shit, and ass.