sep 19, 1982 - First documented use of :-) and :-(

Description:

Scott Fahlman, a retired Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon, is the first person to suggest using the smiley face emoticons that are more internationally recognized.

He created the two emoticons after noticing that it was difficult for many users to decipher the difference between posts that were meant to be funny and posts that were meant to be taken seriously in their local CS bulletin board. Someone else had suggested using some kind of explicit joke marker to differentiate messages, and Fahlman suggested using :-). In addition, he created :-( for messages with a more serious undertone. The trend soon caught on around campus, transferred to other schools, and eventually became popular in mainstream media (at the time, AOL and Microsoft) (Fahlman).

The original post reads:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

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

:-(

(“Original Bboard Thread in Which :-) Was Proposed.”)

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