news articles on the 20th anniversary of :-)

[Drew Danielson]

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/09/19/offbeat.smiley.reut/index.html
<snip>
"Humans have managed to communicate with the written word for thousands
of years without strewing crudely fashioned ideograms across their
parchments. It is as if the written word were a cutting-edge technology
without useful precedents," groused Neal Stephenson in the New Republic
in 1993.

[CMU CS researcher Scott] Fahlman stands by his creation. "If
Shakespeare were tossing off a quick note complaining about the lack of
employee parking spaces near the Globe Theater, he might have produced
the same kind of sloppy prose that the rest of us do," Fahlman writes on
his Web site.
</snip>

and for those who read German -
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,214156,00.html