In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon

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The history of the emoticon. Note: I separated the emoticon elements in this post so they don’t get turned into emojis.

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 interesting than a lone genius moment.
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There’s an interesting coda to this story: For years, the original bboard thread existed only in fading memory. The bulletin board posts had been deleted, and Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department had moved to new systems. The old messages seemed lost forever.

Between 2001 and 2002, Mike Jones, a former Carnegie Mellon researcher then working at Microsoft, sponsored what Fahlman calls a “digital archaeology” project. Jeff Baird and the Carnegie Mellon facilities staff undertook a painstaking effort: locating backup tapes from 1982, finding working tape drives that could read the obsolete media, decoding old file formats, and searching for the actual posts. The team recovered the thread, revealing not just Fahlman’s famous post but the entire three-day community discussion that led to it.

The recovered messages, which you can read here, show how collaboratively the emoticon was developed—not a lone genius moment but an ongoing conversation proposing, refining, and building on the group’s ideas.

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To me, the interesting part is where they say they searched through PDP-10 backup tapes. That means there’s a bunch of computer history in store somewhere.

Scott Fahlman was previously at MIT, an ITS and Maclisp user, and was part of the Spice Lisp project which is still actively used today since it evolved into CMU CL and its offshoot SBCL.

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The thing spread through USENET in the 1980s, I remember discussions in the Finnish Usenet language groups of how to call it in Finnish. (FWIW it became “hymiö”, which is a very nice translation, literally “smile-thing”).

In general I hope there’s a lot of those non-English discussion groups saved for future digital archaeologists.

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