"On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university's bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as "the inventor...or at least one of the inventors" of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment."
"The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon's "bboard," which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury. That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled "WARNING!""
On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman proposed using :-) and :-( as explicit markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments on an electronic bulletin board. The proposal responded to a recent thread about a physics problem in which a facetious post titled "WARNING!" about mercury contamination was mistaken by some readers as serious. The emoticon suggestion aimed to compensate for the lack of vocal tone and body language in text-based communication. The introduction of these simple markers provided a low-cost convention for indicating intent and contributed to the wider emergence of emoticons and sarcastic online expression.
Read at Ars Technica
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