Yesterday (Sept. 19) was the 25th anniversary of the birth of the infamous smiley via a bulletin board message on a primitive pre-ARPA Carnegie Mellon Universtiy network. Smiley's inventor Scott Fahlman tells the story of its emergence into the public domain along with the original message's recovery from CMU's tape archives.

Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.

This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger

What began 25 years ago as a few emoticons to inject some basic moods -- humor, anger, wink -- into nascent text messaging has become flood of graphic innovation with emoticons reflecting wide ranges of expression; Skype chat dedicates a key menu item to a selection of 72 choices to express "a picture worth a thousand words". Pamela incorporates a Rich Mood Editor, which has been broken out as a free Skype Extra, to mix text, emoticons and hyperlinks. Entire websites are devoted to providing emoticons.

Hat tip to Jaanus Kase for pointing this one out; he shows a commerative flag displayed at CMU. And thanks, Scott, for bringing emotional life to text messaging.

Update: Peter Parkes at Skype has posted about this anniversary and provided a link to some "hidden" Skype emoticons as well.

Tags: Emoticons, smileys, Skype, Pamela, Rich Mood Editor, Skype Extra, Scott Fahlman, Jaanus Kase