The First Smiley?

Jesse Sheidlower jester at PANIX.COM
Fri Sep 13 12:43:43 UTC 2002


On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 08:31:32AM -0400, Grant Barrett wrote:
> On Friday, Sep 13, 2002, at 08:19 America/New_York, Jesse Sheidlower
> wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 07:45:47AM -0400, Grant Barrett wrote:
> >>A Usenet post which contains the supposed first use of :) as a smiley
> >>or emoticon, from 19 September 1982,  has been uncovered.
> >>
> >>http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html
> >
> >I thought Barry had posted an example from a
> >newspaper ad from the 1950s at one point.
>
> That's right. My post was missing a key word: the first *online*
> smiley.

The CMU story is, in any case, very interesting. It's also nice
to see a message on a Microsoft site talking about how it was
necessary to use FreeBSD and NetBSD to do the needed data recovery....

Jesse Sheidlower



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