:-) turns 24

So it turns out the original smiley emoticon was invented 24 years ago yesterday to signify joke postings on an online bulletin board (at Carnegie Mellon University, which I briefly attended). Someone made a deadpan joke about a chemical spill in an elevator, which was taken seriously by someone else, triggering much caterwauling and gnashing of teeth. The smiley was meant to prevent such misunderstandings in the future, so really, it's a safety measure!

Yeah, the smiley is annoying and insipid, and the recent graphic updates are horribly worse. But it's pretty fascinating that when presented with a limited means of communications-- i.e. an ASCII-text-only bulletin board-- people were able to repurpose existing symbols to have an almost immediately-evident new meaning, compensating for said limitations. Emoticons would have been perfect for telegraphy's charge-per-word model, except that telegrams counted each punctuation mark as a word.

I LOVE YOU TOO COLON HYPHEN CLOSE PARENTHESIS STOP

It's also interesting that the smiley was preceded by another, much lamer ASCII smile icon: \__/ Perhaps one could use it today to signify "washtub."

Next post will be meatier, but this one had a time peg ;-)

Comments

[Michal]

Nice post. Where'd you get the idea from? :-)