http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20829611/
Digital smiley face turns 25 Web's ubiquitous colon-hyphen-parenthesis celebrates a milestone Sept 18, 2007 PITTSBURGH - It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. :-) Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message. To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize. Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways." The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown. Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity. Computer-science and linguistics professors contacted by The Associated Press said they were unaware of who first used the symbol. "I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."
