The Smiley Face Turns 25 :-)

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.'"

Editors...

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

Anyone else see an obvious mistake here? :D

obligatory

[blhack]

Smilies are lame :(...

now bow before you evil smiley overlord >:-|
(.)(.)
^emoticons, making perl regex NSFW for 24 years!

25 years ago...

[The Living Fractal]

And it wasn't short after that fateful day, in the next post in fact, that the 8========D came along, forever ruining the intarweb. Historians would later say it was only a matter of time.

Re:wtf ??

[Bushido Hacks]

>:-O Who are you working for?!
6:45:57... 6:45:58... 6:45:59...

Re:24?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I know we were using these on a message board in 1979-1980 at a community college in Michigan prior to then."

That's nothing. The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls were using them back then!

Re:Graphical smilies suck

[gardyloo]

Yeah, doesn't that make you want to ******inate someone?

Re:Graphical smilies suck

[UbuntuDupe]

As a matter of fact, Plato only used Greek characters.

(And people don't typically capitalize all the letters in his name. Just a heads-up.)

Futurama?

[camperdave]

Hmm... 0-| = I'm Leela and I'm not impressed?

Re:24?

[blhack]

As odd as, say, someone keeping printouts of 25+ year old conversations from community college message boards? ;)

Welcome to slashdot, you must be new here. Here is your 100 sided dice, your PHD in engineering that you acquired from google University. You're unbelievable hott girlfriend that is part of the demo-scene and collects old VAX/VMS hardware for fun should come in the mail soon...OR WILL SHE COME VIA TCP_OVER CARRIER PIGEON!!!??!!

nobody knows YOU INSENSATIVE CLOD!

Re:24?

[Jarjarthejedi]

Today's Headline - New Hieroglyph Discovered in Egyptian Pyramid

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.

Re:The only thing I see wrong...

[brarrr]

you grew up in a 300 baud modem? must have been both uncomfortable and incredibly noisy. it'd be like constantly trying to see through the hayes.

Re:The Cheer

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

\(^o^)/

KUPO!!!

Re:2007-1982 = 25

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"(Read my comment history to find out how old I really am -- you might have to be a subscriber, though)"

PROTIP: Nobody cares.

Re:Editors...

[WwWonka]

"Anyone else see an obvious mistake here? :D"

I have NO idea what you are talking about! ;-)
now bite me! :-P
oh, wait, I'm sorry, that was rude :-(
forgive me? :-|
yes? ALRIGHT! :-)

Re:The only thing I see wrong...

[Jay L]

Nice ATtitude. Triple-plus.

Re:My favorite smilie

[ampathee]

See Dinosaur Comics [qwantz.com].

OGC

The emoticon is dead... long live XML!

[schmiddy]

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 that ;-)

Even 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: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:text>
</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.

Re:24?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey pal, some of us never believed that 100 siders were proper polyhedral dice. All the other stuff is true though.

Re:can you count?

[sunami88]

Its like Zonk is trying too hard to unimpress us these days. Before he just was unimpressive (see what I did there?).

Re:Um, look at the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

only on slashdot do the basement dwellers let it be known that they think the vagina is located somewhere between a woman's breasts.

Re:Zonked

[fractoid]

Seeing someone who's old enough to spell properly, and doesn't know that the original smiley face had a nose, makes me feel so, so old. :(

Re:Um, look at the article.

[fractoid]

That's not breasts, that's a bicycle.

(.Y.)  <-- tits

(_._) <-- ass ;)

When I read this headline...

[Markos]

The first thing that popped into my head was: "I wonder how old the Penis bird is?"

Curse you slashdot.

Re:24?

[ripragged]

In a related note, Microsoft was the first to commercially use an emoticon as a trademark, with Windows XP.

Re:Um, look at the article.

[Short Circuit]

only on slashdot do the basement dwellers let it be known that they think the vagina is located somewhere between a woman's breasts.

Only on Slashdot does someone mistake a Y for a vagina...

Re:The emoticon is dead... long live XML!

[SL Baur]

Yeah, and I've seen a draft of the 15,000 page MOHumor-XML (Microsoft Open Humor-XML) standard which includes indispensible tags like <Smiley-style-as-in-Outlook-1998> and <Apply-Sarcasm-filter-used-in-Outlook-for-Macintosh-in-2001>.

Looks like we're going to have another standards battle on our hands :(.

Re:The only thing I see wrong...

[keeboo]

AArrgh... Too many old-fart nerd jokes here! I'm gonna&#*(% NO CARRIER

Re:Zonked

[Saint Stephen]

I've always written it as :-). I've been on the net since 93. Back since in the days when you NEVER wanted to meet anyone who actually used the internet in real life.

Re:24?

[franoculator]

Very well, where should I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims, like he invented the emoticon. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. A sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.

Re:Math error

[DaveAtFraud]

Perhaps a misplaced parenthesis?

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Can't... stop...

[vonsneerderhooten]

Wow. That was the first proper /. thread I've read in a while.

Re:Graphical smilies suck

[langelgjm]

Yeah, doesn't that make you want to ******inate someone?

Burninate?

Wow...

[mmxsaro]

I've never seen so many smiley faces around here on /. Quick, someone post a story about Vista before we all get too friendly with each other.

The best emoticon EVER

[OGC]

http://qwantz.com/archive/001057.html [qwantz.com] Tell your friends ok.

Guys... we get older...

[NotQuiteReal]

I disagree - Personally, I become more distinguished.

Right up until the time I drop dead.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Re:Guys... we get older...

[zippthorne]

Do you have to take classes in curmudgeonry or can you just claim equivalent experience and take the test?

Re:You mean Smiley vs. Smiley Face?

[SolitaryMan]

You'll love

You'll love (. )( .)

Here. Fixed that for you too ;)

Re:got :---)

[somersault]

Darn straight (: