On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman 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 emoticon, the full story reveals something more…

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