Smiley Lore :-)
Scott E.Fahlman
Sep 12, 2002
A lot of people have asked me about this, so I thought I'd
put the information here, linked under my home page.
Yes, I am the inventor of the sideways `smiley face' (some-
times called an `emoticon') that is commonly used in e-mail,
chat, and newsgroup posts. Or at least I'm one of the inventors.
By the early 1980's, the School of Computer Science (SCS)
community at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) was making heavy
use of online bulletin boards or `bboards'. These were a precur-
sor of today's newsgroups, and they were an important social me-
chanism in the department � a place where faculty, staff, and
students could discuss the weighty matters of the day on an equal
footing. Many of the posts were serious: talk announcements, re-
quests for information, and things like `I've just found a ring
in the fifth-floor men's room. Who does it belong to?'. Other
posts discussed topics of general interest, ranging from politics
to abortion to campus parking to keyboard layout (in increasing
order of passion). Even in those days extended `flame wars' were
common.
Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts
were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if some-
one 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 ca-
se a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious sa-
fety warning.
This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seri-
ously) 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 se-
riously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for
displeasure, frustration, or anger.
This convention caught on quickly around CMU and soon spread
to other Universities and research labs via the primitive comput-
er networks of the day. (Some University alumni who had moved on
to other places, continued to read our bulletin boards as a way
of keeping in touch with their old community.)
Within a few months, we started seeing the lists with dozens
of `smilies': open-mouthed surprise, person wearing glasses, Ab-
raham Lincoln, Santa Claus, the Pope, and so on. Producing such
clever compilations has become a serious hobby for some people.
But only my two original smilies, plus the `winky' ;-) and the
`noseless' variants, seem to be in common use for actual communi-
cation. It's interesting to note that `Microsoft Network' and
`America Online' now intercept these character strings and turn
them into little pictures. Personally I think this destroys the
whimsical element of the original.
Unfortunately I didn't keep a copy of my original post. It
didn't seem like a big deal at the time. By the time I realized
that this smiley phenomenon was going to be long-lasting and that
it would spread around the world as the Internet grew, it was too
late to easily retrieve the post, and the original message was
lost for many years.
Several attempts to find the post on old backup tapes were
unsuccessful. But recently Mike Jones of `Microsoft' sponsored a
more serious `archeological dig' through our ancient backup ta-
pes. Jeff Baird and the CMU SCS facilities staff put in a heroic
effort with the support and encouragement of Howard Wactlar, Bob
Cosgrove, and David Livingston. They found the proper tapes, lo-
cated a working tape drive that could read the ancient media, de-
coded the old formats, and did a lot of searching to find the ac-
tual posts. I am most grateful to all who participated in this
successful quest, which I call the `Digital Coelacanth Project'.
So the message itself and the thread that gave rise to it,
are here. The exact date of the smiley's birth can now be deter-
mined: September 19, 1982. It's great to have this message back
just in time for the 20th anniversary of the original post.
As you can see, the note, in which I suggested this thing,
was quite short and casual � just part of an ongoing discussion
that involved many people. I apparently didn't even read it over
before posting since a word or two were dropped in editing. I do
remember writing a longer message in which I explained the need
for a humor-marker in more detail, and suggested the `:-)' symbol
along with `:-(' to indicate anger or real unhappiness. But this
longer message must have come later � perhaps a later bulletin
board post or an e-mail message that I sent to someone. In any
case that more detailed post didn't turn up in our search.
Many people have denounced the very idea of the smiley poin-
ting out that good writers should have no need to explicitly la-
bel their humorous comments. Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, and
Mark Twain got along just fine without this. And by labeling the
remarks that are not meant to be taken seriously, we spoil the
joke. In satirical writing half the fun is in never being quite
sure whether the author is serious or not.
To a large degree I agree with these critics. Perhaps the e-
mail smiley has done more to degrade our written communication
than to improve it. But in defense of the idea let me say two
things.
First not all people who post messages have the literary
skill of Shakespeare or Twain, and even those luminaries had bad
days. If Shakespeare were tossing off a quick note complaining
about the lack of employee parking spaces near the `Globe' Theat-
er, he might have produced the same kind of sloppy prose that the
rest of us do. Besides Shakespeare's work is full of cliches and
his spelling was atrocious. :-)
Second and more important, these authors were publishing
their words in a different medium, with different properties. If
100,000 copies of a novel or an essay were distributed in printed
form and if 1% of the readers didn't get the joke and were outra-
ged at what they had read, there was nothing these clueless read-
ers could do to spoil the enjoyment of the other 99%. But if it
were possible for each of the 1000 clueless readers to write a
lengthy counter-argument and to flood these into the same distri-
bution channels as the original work, and if others could then
jump into the fray in similar fashion, you can see the problems
that this would cause. If the judicious use of a few smilies can
reduce the frequency of such `firestorms', then maybe it's not
such a bad idea after all. Again, we're talking here about casual
writing on the Internet, not great works printed in one-way media
that relatively inaccessible to the general public.
One final point. I've seen various claims that the sideways
smiley was invented by someone else. I believe that I invented
this particular glyph and the `turn your head to one side' prin-
ciple independently. I don't recall seeing anything like this be-
fore my post, though a few messages in the thread, we just locat-
ed, come close. Leonard Hamey's post suggesting `{#}' for humor
might be taken as an example of `turn your head to one side' �
it's not really clear if that was his intent � and apparently
`\__/' was used by one of our research groups to indicate a smi-
le. I've never seen any hard evidence that the `:-)' sequence was
in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone
who actually claims to have invented it before I did. But it's
always possible that someone else had the same idea � it's a sim-
ple and obvious idea after all.
Some people have told me that the `:-)' or `:)' convention
was used by teletype operators in the old days. Maybe so. I have-
n't seen any examples of this, but it's plausible, given the li-
mitations of the character set in that medium.
So, the smiley idea may have appeared and disappeared a few
times before my 1982 post, but it is pretty clear from the timing
that my suggestion was the one that finally took hold, spread
around the world, and spawned thousands of variations.
Let me close with a quote from an interview with Vladimir
Nabokov, author of `Lolita' and other modern classics:
`How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the
immediate past?'
`I often think there should exist a special typographical
sign for a smile � some sort of concave mark, a supine round bra-
cket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question'.
[http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm]