The Smiley Face Turns 25 :-) 250
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.'"
Damn editors (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, look at the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Teletypes (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes... That "Old School" porn...
Pinup girls printed in 80-columns of delicious Courier(ish) typeface.
I would be stunned if smiley faces were not in use to some degree in the 70's, or even the late 60's, when teletypes (with 110-baud modems) were how most news services sent and received news...
They had the nice pin-up girls...
And, what work it must have been to make ACII art back in the day, before video-card drivers had ASCII-effect filters...
Sheesh!
Re:Prior Art? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Graphical smilies suck (Score:1, Insightful)
Advantages:
1. They are not picked up by forums/IM programs and replaced with an annoying graphic.
2. They look down at the sentence they apply to.
3. There are no double chins when a smiley preceeds a closing bracket (Like this
4. Proper noses (c:
Re:Editors... (Score:3, Insightful)
And sarcasm... (Score:2, Insightful)
got :---) (Score:3, Insightful)