On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman data-offer-url=”https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm” class=”external-link” data-event-click=”{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm"}” href=”https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online.
His proposal: use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments.
While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor … or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face data-offer-url=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon” class=”external-link” data-event-click=”{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon"}” href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>emoticon, the full story reveals something more…
