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E-mail's signature smiley face is long in the tooth
Thursday marked the 20th anniversary of one of e-mail's most useful time saving devices, the "smiley face" emoticon.
Scott Fahlman, then a Carnegie Mellon University professor, didn't know his 1982 suggestion in a post on CMU's online bulletin board to use the symbol to prevent someone's jokes or sarcasm from being taken seriously would become a staple for millions of e-mail messages and Internet chat clients.
"It just grew as computers grew," Fahlman said. "I think it hit me when there was the coup in Russia with Boris Yeltsin and we were seeing images of tanks and military people in the streets, and people were sending messages to their families that said 'I'm okay' with the smiley tacked on at the end. That's when it really grabbed me how international it had become."
In the original e-mail, sent to colleagues at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, Fahlman also suggested the often-used frown face.
"Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(."
Over two decades, emoticons have taken on a life of their own to convey almost any conceivable emotion. Someone flirting in a chat room can wink ;-) at someone they're interested in, and the recipient can use an emoticon to register his or her surprise :-0.
And if they're not pleased with the come on, they might stick their tongue out by typing :-P.
Fahlman, by the way, doesn't use the word "emoticon," which was first popularized by author David Sanderson, who wrote "Smiley," a book documenting many of the 2,000-plus emoticons now in use. Fahlman calls them "smileys" and "frownies."
Nor does Fahlman partake in the practice of dropping the hyphen that serves as the smiley's nose. "Personally, I don't like those. They look a little frog-like, instead of human-like, but I suppose they're useful to people using instant messaging on a cell phone who want to save a character," he said.
Early bulletin boards were limited to characters on the keyboard. Before Fahlman came up with the smiley and frownie, there had been a debate on the CMU bulletin board on how to convey sarcasm or jokes, as a number of those comments had been taken at face value, sparking a series of heated exchanges.
"Early on we needed a special mark to show that a sentence was a question, and a special mark to show exclamation, because when we were writing we didn't have tone of voice to convey those feelings," Fahlman said. "Nowadays I could paste a picture of myself smiling into the text, but that's still a bit of a hassle."
These days, America Online allows users to insert the familiar black on yellow smiley face in instant messages, and users who type the three smiley characters in some Microsoft applications will automatically see a computer-generated, smiley-faced graphic appear in its place.
One of the smiley's predecessors was to write the word "joke" after every humorous comment.
"I just proposed it in a little post as part of an ongoing discussion. I found that the character set was much richer if you turned your head sideways," Fahlman said. "I don't know if I was the first person to type those three characters together, but it's pretty clear that my post is the one that launched it."
Within days, other users of the CMU bulletin board were using the smiley and frownie, and within a few months, people were using the characters on bulletin boards at other universities.
Fahlman is on leave from CMU, working on research in Pittsburgh for IBM Research's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Height, N.Y. He was one of the five core designers of the Common Lisp computer language, which has been widely used to develop artificial intelligence applications. His current research also focuses on the use of artificial intelligence in computers.
"I should mention that this was just 10 minutes of my life. I hope it's not the only thing I'll be remembered for," Fahlman said. "I hope I'll be remembered for my work, which will ultimately put more common sense in computers and the way they work."
