Break out the lambrini, it's the emoticon's 25th birthday today
Emoticons. Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t deny you’ve used them at least once, even if it was ironically. Can you believe they were first documented 25 years ago? I bet all the 🙂 and even the 🙁 are out on the town today, boozing hard and fast, falling in and out of nightclubs as they celebrate their 25th birthday. Expect to see some very hung-over emoticons online tomorrow…
Apparently in a forum discussion on September 19th, 1982 (I didn’t even think the ‘tinternet was around then for civillians, let alone had ‘forums’), a Carnegie Mellon professor, Scott Fahlman, used a 🙂 to demonstrate a character sequence for showing humour online. “Read it sideways”, he told everyone. No doubt they all fell off their desk chairs in shocked amazement, and are now cursing the day they ever helped spread the emoticon virus.
Original forum discussion where the emoticon originated (via Shiny Shiny)
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