10 ms·
Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed
- ZeljkoS 10y agoInteresting 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons) would look today if one of alternative symbols was accepted?
- anewhnaccount 10y agoI guess they might look a bit like the ones at the bottom under "Eastern".
- nathancahill 10y ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- tetraodonpuffer 10y agowould be interesting to know where that one started...
- wodenokoto 10y agoThere is a whole parallel smiley history from Asia that either hasn't been documented as well as the western smileys or simply hasn't been translated. The notable thing about asian smileys is that they have the same horizon as the text, whereas western smileys needs to be turned 90 degrees. Compare (^.^) with :-) So given that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is both unicode and horizontal indicates that it is either from Asia or came to be after asian smileys became more prevalent in the west.
- TorKlingberg 10y agoProbably Japan. ツ is a very common Japanese charterer pronounced "tsu". As wodenokoto said there is a whole separate history of Asian smileys that are right way up, with the face in the middle and various decorations on both sides. They did have the advantage of a larger set of characters from the start.
- jcl 10y agoOne example predating computers is "henohenomoheji", a face made out of Japanese hiragana, used as a generic face in children's art and crafts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henohenomoheji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henohenomoheji
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoTIL it's a kaomoji :-) Here's an article by a regular user of the emoticon http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the-best-way-to-type-__/371351/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the-be... And a wiki about those characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
- iSnow 10y agoI am guessing, but I'd suspect one of the better known imageboards like 2Chan, 4Chan or Ylilauta.
- retox 10y ago( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- lucaslazaro 10y agoNot 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 10y agoOf course, Fahlman is a Lisper, so of course he's going to use parens... ;)
- gberger 10y agoI don't understand "{#}" and "\__/". Are they supposed to be arbitrary markers, or interpreted in some way?
- paler 10y ago{#} would be a grinning mouth with teeth showing, and \__/ is a smiling mouth.
- Grangar 10y agoThe second one could be interpreted as a smiling mouth. I think.
- c0achmcguirk 10y ago"{#}" was proposed because it looks like teeth showing. "\_/" was proposed because it looks like a smile.
- david-given 10y agoI'm trying to visualise the first one, but the only thing which comes to mind is Jaws from the old James Bond films. http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/jamesbond/images/8/86/Jaws_-_Profile_(2).jpg http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/jamesbond/images/8/86/Ja...
- leereeves 10y agoPerhaps {#} would have evolved into Japanese-style emoticons like: (-_-) and (^.^)
- f_allwein 10y ago19-Sep-82 11:44, Scott E Fahlman invents the ':-)'. Nice. :-)
- anotheryou 10y agodid you mean that as a joke? or do you really think it's nice? <:-)
- f_allwein 10y agoI think it's cool to see this more or less live in action, and in the original context, yes (not sure what the emoji is for that). With many terms/ expressions, it's very unclear where they originated, so if this is indeed the first usage, it is nice to see.
- Finnucane 10y agoProbably the first time online. There are print antecedents to online emoticons.
- minivan 10y ago"o>-<|= for messages of interest to women" I'm glad we are past that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- grenoire 10y agoI don't see it, anybody care to explain?
- junke 10y agoWe are?
- dhimes 10y agoFunny. 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.
- jaywunder 10y ago
- anjc 10y agoWow that's interesting (:
- guessmyname 10y agoHere is a list of popular emoticons: https://textfac.es/ https://textfac.es/
- xyzzy4 10y agoI'm sure :-) has been independently invented a million times.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoIndeed, there is evidence of the kind of typographic play behind the 'smiley' from as early as the 19th century: http://theday.co.uk/arts/internet-celebrates-thirty-years-of-emoticons http://theday.co.uk/arts/internet-celebrates-thirty-years-of...
- retox 10y agoBack in my UO days we used =] because it was quicker to type and the in-game font made it look better than a traditional smiley.
- chiph 10y agoInteresting that there are both left-handed and right-handed smileys in the thread. :-) (-:
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- emmet 10y ago| 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 10y agoI don't get it
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jgw 10y agoIt 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`.
- cholantesh 10y agoEmojis 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.
- zamalek 10y agoI find that they're often too cutesy or overstated. In Whatsapp for example, they come across as incredibly flirtatious.
- georgespencer 10y agoThe winking smile should be jokey but I can only interpret it as flirty nowadays ;)
- jharger 10y agoI use the winking with tongue sticking out to mean a joke... but I don't know if everyone else interprets it that way ;) (that was a flirty wink)
- kbenson 10y agoSince I alternate between the smile and winking smile about evenly, you're making me reconsider my past text conversations. ;)
- Cthulhu_ 10y agoI think it's a cultural thing - or more precisely, a non-culture-specific thing, which should be as unoffensive as possible. Honestly, I don't envy those that design and publish emojis, it's a cultural minefield. :-) has no color, gender, outfit or what-have-you. There's been a lot of debate about the skin tone of e.g. the thumbs up emoji (which now comes in half a dozen colors if the relatively ambiguous / non-human yellow isn't to your needs), the gender of emojis depicting jobs, and the color of outfits of emojis depicting jobs.
- kjhughes 10y agoI 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 10y agoI 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.
- jgw 10y agoIndeed it is - Fahlman worked with Steel et. al. on Common Lisp. Other notable folks I recognized in the thread: * Dave Touretzky - author of a well-regarded Lisp textbook in its day * Masaru Tomita - the guy who invented the GLR parser
- soneca 10y agoAnd 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?
- equivocates 10y ago
- equivocates 10y ago
- yitchelle 10y agoInterestingly, 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.
- nicky0 10y agoI beleive the modern usage is no longer to denote a joke. Merely to express a smile.
- halomru 10y agoAt 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.
- WorldMaker 10y agoAt least anecdotally, I've always seen/used :P much more that ;) for funny. ;) has always been more flirty/suggestive, but that may be having spent more of the 90s in MUDs/MUSHes with a greater sense of roleplay. Definitely in modern emoji sets the tongue out emojis seem to be better indicators of an intended sense of humor more than flirty/suggestive ones (plus the combo ;P for intending flirty and funny).
- kelvich 10y agoNabokov'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 10y agoWhich 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 :)
- mipmap04 10y agoAlso interesting, there is a set of telegraphic codes used to decrease the size of messages due to cost: http://people.eku.edu/styere/Encrypt/ABC4/ http://people.eku.edu/styere/Encrypt/ABC4/ Definitely has to be one of the earliest examples of electronic signal compression.
- Scaevolus 10y agoEven beyond explicit codebooks, telegraph operators extensively used standardized abbreviations, meaning what they actually sent/received was remarkably similar to SMS text-speak, for obvious reasons! "Wr r ty gg r 9" => "Where are they going for No. 9?": http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/11/history_of_telegraph_operators_abbreviations_used_by_telegraphers.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/11/history_of_t...
- d_theorist 10y agoDo you have a source for this?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hvass 10y agoThis 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"
- artbikes 10y agoLike most of the cultural inventions of virtual communities there was prior art on PLATO. http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-revisited.html http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...
- Steuard 10y agoThose 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).
- felixgallo 10y agoI was definitely using :-) on Plato in 1979. I'd be surprised if Plato was the first use, though.
- milesf 10y agoAh bulletin boards :) For years I have been searching for a copy of Blue Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Board_(software) 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/ 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.
- artursapek 10y agoThis is creepy. I just opened a PR on GitHub and set the description to ":-)". Then I opened HN and saw this.
- dugluak 10y agolove birds (@> <@) ( _) (_ ) /\ /\
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- glandium 10y ago$ apt moo (__) (oo) /------\/ / | || * /\---/\ ~~ ~~ ..."Have you mooed today?"...
- pcunite 10y ago(｡◕‿◕｡) I see you
- hammock 10y agoReading these BBS always makes me think how much nerdier computer people were back then than they are now. Or am I off base?
- throwanem 10y agoThere was a strong selection effect at the time.
- benbreen 10y agoApropos is this debate about whether an intentional :) shows up in a 1648 poem: http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/15/emoticon_robert_herrick_s_17th_century_poem_to_fortune_does_not_contain.html 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.
- abecedarius 10y agoHuh. That helps explain one I found from the 19th C.: https://www.flickr.com/photos/abecedarius/3054204291/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/abecedarius/3054204291/ a little below middle: "... philosophy in small :)"
- backtoyoujim 10y agoI wonder how many times the initial turn head, grok, smile -- mirroring back to the pareidolia itself, has happened.
- danvoell 10y agoI wonder at what point the nose was removed :)
- throwanem 10y agoMid- to late nineties, to the best of my recollection.
- chalana 10y agoUsenet archives are also a treasure trove for this kind of things. Searching old posts on Usenet feels like modern day archaeology
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoSee in particular something like alt.fan.warlord
- wmccullough 10y agoI 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.
- _audakel 10y ago"Read it sideways. " hahaha love this!
- david-given 10y agoI... now find myself morbidly curious as to whether you could use Unicode diacritic abuse to draw actual pictures. Pasted in example stolen from Glitchr, mainly to see how well HN renders them: ̝̞̟̠͇̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍ ̎̏̐̑̒̚ ̕̚҉ ̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔ ̿̿̿̚̕̕̚̕̚͡ ҉̵̞̟̠̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̟̠͇̊̋̌̍̎ ̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̚̕̚҉ ̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔ ̿̿̿̚̕̕̚̕̚͡ ҉̵̞̟̠̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̟̠͇̊̋̌̍̎ ̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̚̕̚҉ ̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔ ̠̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓ٴٴٴٴٴٴٴٴ -ٴٴٴٴٴٴه ٴٴٴٴٴٴٴٴٴ ٴٴ...
- Imagenuity 10y agoMonday Sept 19th would've been the 34th "smilaversary".