Wednesday, September 19, 2007

:-) is Older Than I Am

Happy 25th, Emoticon! From Mashable:
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first usage of an emoticon, a simple smiley face first used by a Carnegie Mellon professor on an old school bulletin board system. It turns out that the emoticon was not just an afterthought, but a much discussed idea addressing a problem early users of the system were having in separating sarcastic comments from serious ones. Professor Scott Fahlman proposed a smiley face to indicate joking and an upside down one to indicate unhappiness in a thread (captured below).

The original message with the first smiley had been lost for years, but a rather intensive research effort lead to its recovery. Fahlman details the invention and the “dig” to find the original message on his page.


emoticon screen

You might be thinking, "Andie's got a lot of time on her hands, blogging daily about this sort of thing."

If you are thinking that, you probably don't know me very well. The amount of time I spend on fruitless activities bears no correlation to the amount of time I should be spending on productive labors. The convent hasn't changed me that much. I actually have a 4-inch stack of papers to grade... in the next two hours... I guess I should go do that...

1 comment:

Romey said...

Hey good find Andie! I can relate by having no time but finding time for blogging ;-) I also am glad that you're reading RSS feeds through Google Reader.