The First Smiley :-)

By Claudia Lynch, Benchmarks Online Editor

Since the Web folks are "otherwise engaged," and Dr. Baczewski chose to write about the commercialization of the Internet in this month's Network Connection, I thought it might be fun and thought provoking to celebrate the invention of the smiley [ :-) ]. That's right, someone is actually credited with inventing this emoticon, and it is now 20 years old.

It all began, it turns out, at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with a young man named Scott Fahlman. Apparently some folks at Microsoft set out to track down the message that started the whole emoticon revolution, and they did! Following is the message and what they have to say about it (to read their entire site, go here).

The smiley :-) and its many variants are an important (and fun!) part of the worldwide online social culture -- allowing emotions to be conveyed in plain text. It has been in widespread use since the early '80s, when it was first proposed. Yet the original message in which the smiley was invented had been lost -- until now. :-) After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x). Here is Scott's original post:

 

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Scott Fahlman is older now, but he continues to be a member of the Computer Science faculty at CMU (at least sort of, see his homepage for further information/clarification). He has been asked so often about his role in inventing the smiley that he put up a Web page on the topic.

How, you may be wondering, does this relate to the commercialization of the Internet. Well think about this - what if Dr. Fahlman decided that the smiley was his intellectual property? What if he hired lawyers and attempted to charge people for the use of his intellectual property? What if he was able to have people arrested who refused to pay? What if others with similar claims (and proof) followed suit? Perhaps we should all pay a little closer attention when legislation comes up with regard to copyright and intellectual property, particularly when it concerns the Internet. We just may find ourselves legislated out of existence, and that would be a shame.