A bit of triva here for you guys and girls tonight or today, depending where you are. Researchers at Microsoft discovered where the first text based smiley came from which forms the basis for emotional expression in our text based conversations today. 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 dating back 20 years:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)

 

From: Scott E Fahlman

 

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

 

:-(