This week marks an iconic moment in Internet history: the “invention” of the ASCI smiley face, whose descendants have become known as emoticons, by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie-Mellon University.

On Smiley’s 20th birthday, Dr. Fahlman posted some remarks on his site at CMU, including links to the original bboard transactions that led to its birth (unearthed after some serious archaeology by some folks from Microsoft).

Here are a few lines, and a link to Dr. Fahlman’s page.

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” (sometimes 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 1980s, the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards or “bboards”…

[tags]smilies, emoticons, Scott Fahlman, internet history[/tags]