Scott Fahlman proposes the first emoticon :-) on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board

At 11:44 a.m. on 19 September 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman posted a short message to an online bulletin board in the computer-science department at Carnegie Mellon University. Online discussions there had a habit of going off the rails when readers mistook a deadpan joke for a serious claim, so Fahlman offered a simple fix: a typed marker, read sideways, to flag when a post was meant in jest.

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 :-(

The little smiley and frowny faces spread quickly across the early internet, leaping from CMU to other universities and networks. They seeded a whole vocabulary of emoticons built from ordinary keyboard characters, and laid the groundwork for the colourful emoji that followed decades later. Carnegie Mellon recovered the original message from old backup tapes in 2002, twenty years after it was written, preserving one of computing’s most quietly influential punchlines.