The Birth of :-) and :-O

On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 AM, a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University posted a message to a CMU bulletin board with the following proposal: 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c> 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 :-( Tilt your head ninety degrees to the left. There is the smile. There is the frown. The post was rediscovered in September 2002, twenty years later, on a backup tape that someone had refused to throw out. Until that moment Fahlman thought his proposal had been lost forever. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The problem it solved ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Written text does not carry tone. Sarcasm reads as sincerity. Jokes read as insults. Anything subtle becomes a fight. This was a known problem on the early CMU bulletin boards. People were getting into arguments because their colleagues couldn't tell they were kidding. Fahlman's three characters were an attempt at a metadata layer on top of plain text: this thing to the left was a joke, please do not take it seriously. Three characters. Solved a real problem. Spread instantly. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The BBS explosion ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The proposal escaped CMU and reached FidoNet within a couple of years. By the late 80s every BBS conference was full of them. By 1990 they were so common that people used them without thinking about it. Three characters had become part of the language. The original two grew quickly into a vocabulary: :-) smile :-( frown :-D grin ;-) wink :-O surprise :-P sticking tongue out :-/ skeptical :'-( crying >:-( angry 8-) glasses, smile :-X lips sealed :-* kiss The "noses" came and went depending on subculture. Some people typed :) instead of :-). The nose vs no-nose debate was, at the time, a real one. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The Japanese branch ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Around the same time, Japanese BBS users developed an entirely separate emoticon tradition called kaomoji that did not require head-tilting: (^_^) happy (T_T) crying (^_~) wink (>_<) annoyance (o_O) confusion (_) starstruck Kaomoji read upright, used a wider character set, and were generally considered more expressive than the western style. They also predated emoji proper by about fifteen years. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The descent into emoji ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── In 1999, a Japanese designer named Shigetaka Kurita drew the first set of graphical emoji for NTT DoCoMo. Twelve-by- twelve pixel images. The Unicode Consortium added them officially in 2010. By 2015 every smartphone keyboard had them. The graphical version is more colorful. It is also less expressive. A :-O typed by a clever writer carries timing and rhythm and voice. An emoji 😮 just sits there, drawn by someone else. The original three-character format had a craftsmanship to it. You composed. You varied. You invented your own variants. The emoji turned that into clipart. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Twenty years on ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Scott Fahlman has been asked many times whether he regrets introducing the smiley. He has consistently said no. He thinks it made the world a slightly less hostile place. I think he is right. :-) --- END OF MESSAGE ---