Happy 20th Aniversary, Emoticon!!

[DanL]

Today's September 19th, 2002. You guys know what that means - it's the 20th aniversary of the emoticon, smiley, whatever you call this little fella---> :-)

Saw this link on slashdot a week or two back... basically it's about the search for the first known emoticon. They found it on a old '82 carnagie mellon computer science bboard system type of thing backup, and only a week or two ago. Just in time for the :-)'s 20th aniversary!

http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/smiley/smiley.html

[David Kelly]

couldn't be a better day to have a birthday im only one year younger!!

[srawls]

here

Lots of nice info in that, but here's the summary:

That puts the typographic smiley all the way back to 1953, and as Barrett mentions, was in print rather than online.

Stephen