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Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

350 points| ZeljkoS | 9 years ago |cs.cmu.edu

146 comments

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[+] kelvich|9 years ago|reply
Nabokov's interview. The New York Times [1969]

     -- How  do you rank yourself among writers
     (living) and of the immediate past?

     -- I often think there should exist a  special  typographical
     sign  for  a  smile -- some sort of concave mark,
     a supine round bracket, which I would now like to
     trace in reply to your question.
[+] mjburgess|9 years ago|reply
Which had already been used in the days of the telegraph.

The first use of OMG (oh my god) and other such initialisms was 19th. C.

I would imagine that includes :)

[+] jgw|9 years ago|reply
It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming and hackerish about showing it as a 7-bit glyph.

I think the Internet fundamentally changed when that happened.

Tangentially-related, I can't fathom why someone would post YouTube videos of `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl`.

[+] sippeangelo|9 years ago|reply
My biggest problem with this is when the images auto-replacing your text emotes convey a completely different expression, and you have no control over it.

Skype is the worst offender, where for example the ":3" cat-face gets replaced by an image of a whole cat, without a face at all. If you disable this "feature" in your options, it's only disabled on YOUR end. The receiving client will still convert your text into images, so now you have NO clue at all how the receiving party interprets your expressions.

Telegram does this RIGHT, where the conversion is done BEFORE your message is sent. If you disable it on your end, the receiver will only receive the text you intended.

[+] cholantesh|9 years ago|reply
Emojis are stunningly ugly to me, though I did appreciate throwing out the custom doge and Doom space marine ones at random when my team used Slack.
[+] katurian|9 years ago|reply
I'm with you. I put a space between the : and the ) to prevent the graphic emoji : )
[+] lips|9 years ago|reply
My workaround is a nose :^)
[+] benbreen|9 years ago|reply
Apropos is this debate about whether an intentional :) shows up in a 1648 poem:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/15/emotico...

Here's the verse:

Tumble me down, and I will sit

Upon my ruines (smiling yet :)

I think that the article does a fairly convincing job of showing that this is just weird 17th century typography, but then again, there was enough experimentation with printing at the time that it also wouldn't surprise me if it was intentional, at least at some point in the typesetting process.

[+] artbikes|9 years ago|reply
Like most of the cultural inventions of virtual communities there was prior art on PLATO.

http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...

[+] Steuard|9 years ago|reply
Those emoticons seem to have been in many ways better than :-) and its relatives, but it sounds like they 1) relied on details of the platform, and (related) 2) never caught on more broadly. So I think it's still reasonable to celebrate the invention of :-) (while maybe imagining how much richer text conversations might have been if the PLATO text-display system had become ubiquitous).
[+] ZeljkoS|9 years ago|reply
Interesting thing to note is that before Fahlman suggested ":-)" symbol, Leonard Hamey suggested "{#}" (see 17-Sep-82 17:42 post). After that, someone suggested "\__/" (see 20-Sep-82 17:56 post). But only ":-)" gained popularity.

It is funny to imagine how emoticons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons) would look today if one of alternative symbols was accepted?

[+] lucaslazaro|9 years ago|reply
Not only # \__/ and :-) were suggested but also '&', which the explanation on why is (to say at least) imaginative:

17-Sep-82 17:40 Keith Wright at CMU-10A *%&#$ Jokes! No, no, no! Surely everyone will agree that "&" is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter). It sounds funny (say it loud and fast three times). I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum of the CRT it would even smell funny!

[+] jgw|9 years ago|reply
Of course, Fahlman is a Lisper, so of course he's going to use parens... ;)
[+] gberger|9 years ago|reply
I don't understand "{#}" and "\__/". Are they supposed to be arbitrary markers, or interpreted in some way?
[+] anewhnaccount|9 years ago|reply
I guess they might look a bit like the ones at the bottom under "Eastern".
[+] leereeves|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps {#} would have evolved into Japanese-style emoticons like: (-_-) and (^.^)
[+] kjhughes|9 years ago|reply
I vividly remember having the following conversation with a fellow CMU undergrad around this time:

Me: What's with all the :-) in the posts?

Friend: It indicates joking.

Me: Why?

Friend: What's it look like?

Me: A pinball plunger.

Friend: Rotate 90 degrees.

Me: Ohhhhhh.

:-)

[+] p333347|9 years ago|reply
I think this is one of those things that once you see you can never unsee. :-)
[+] hnst|9 years ago|reply
had a similar thing happen first time seeing: lol

thought it was a plate with knife and fork..

[+] milesf|9 years ago|reply
Ah bulletin boards :)

For years I have been searching for a copy of Blue Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Board_(software)), a popular BBS program in the Vancouver, BC, Canada area written by the late Martin Sikes http://www.penmachine.com/martinsikes/

I even talked with the owner of Sota Software, the publisher, but I never heard anything back.

If anyone has a copy, PLEASE let me know! I've been wanting to setup a memorial telnet Blue Board site for decades now.

[+] hvass|9 years ago|reply
This is gold:

"Since Scott's original proposal, many further symbols have been proposed here:

(:-) for messages dealing with bicycle helmets @= for messages dealing with nuclear war"

[+] minivan|9 years ago|reply
"o>-<|= for messages of interest to women"

I'm glad we are past that.

[+] kbart|9 years ago|reply
Past what? Topics interesting to women? Though I agree that this emoticon is ugly and it took me some time to understand what it symbolizes.
[+] dhimes|9 years ago|reply
Funny. I'm just a couple years removed from that thread (I was an undergrad then) and I don't even "get" that emoticon. A person standing on a platform with her arms in the air?

Edit: nevermind. Was explained while I was typing.

[+] 3chelon|9 years ago|reply
I can't understand the confusion here - which bit is hard to follow, the graphic or the sexism?
[+] grenoire|9 years ago|reply
I don't see it, anybody care to explain?
[+] p333347|9 years ago|reply
I see one Guy Steele in that thread. Is he the Guy Steele? Glancing wikipedia suggests he was asst prof at CMU around that time. Just curious.
[+] emmet|9 years ago|reply
| I have a picture of ET holding a chainsaw in .press file format. The file exists in /usr/wah/public/etchainsaw.press on the IUS.

:-)

[+] nicky0|9 years ago|reply
I don't get it
[+] wmccullough|9 years ago|reply
I love how different the conversations were on the internet then.

Now adays, if a thread came about to propose the ':-)', people would devolve into a debate about the proper use of the parenthesis, and at least one user would claim that '(-:' was a better choice, though it is the darkhorse option for the community.

[+] backtoyoujim|9 years ago|reply
I wonder how many times the initial turn head, grok, smile -- mirroring back to the pareidolia itself, has happened.
[+] chiph|9 years ago|reply
Interesting that there are both left-handed and right-handed smileys in the thread. :-) (-:
[+] yitchelle|9 years ago|reply
Interestingly, before I read this post and the comments, I have always thought that :-) means a smiling face. Ie, to convey a sense of a smile after writing a message. Not a "I am joking" message.

Well, I learned something today.

[+] halomru|9 years ago|reply
At some point between 1982 and the late nineties ;) replaced :-) as the joke indicator. But with modern WhatsApp rendering ;) as a suggestive grin instead of a simple wink I imagine the current generation of teenagers has found a new innocent joke marker.
[+] nicky0|9 years ago|reply
I beleive the modern usage is no longer to denote a joke. Merely to express a smile.
[+] soneca|9 years ago|reply
And the proposal to have a separate channel to jokes is as old as the smiley. There is always that guy.

Have anyone thought about creating a separate HN for jokes?

[+] danvoell|9 years ago|reply
I wonder at what point the nose was removed :)
[+] Imagenuity|9 years ago|reply
Monday Sept 19th would've been the 34th "smilaversary".