Attention, Internet addicts: There's a familiar face you should be greeting a happy 30th birthday. It's none other than the ever-smiling emoticon
The inventor of the emoticon, university professor Scott Fahlman, recalled the now-familiar sideways face's humble roots as an in-house joke among academic colleagues.
"Given the nature of the community (on the university's online bulletin boards), a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response," said Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, in a statement marking the emoticon's 30th birthday on September 19.
"That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning," he noted.
Fahlman said the problem prompted some to suggest that posts meant as a joke were to be explicitly marked.
While many "joke markers" were suggested, he settled on using a sequence of text-based characters - as bulletin boards at the time could handle only ASCII characters.
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