Congrats to Snopes for tracking down an earlier use, but it was the :-) smilie that caught on, and people didn't get it from Readers' Digest. So although the 1

Congrats to Snopes for tracking down an earlier use, but it was the :-) smilie that caught on, and people didn't get it from Readers' Digest. So although the 1982 message wasn't the first-ever emoticon it was the one that got the Internet (or more specifically Usenet) using emoticons. It's similar to pointing out that Christopher Columbus didn't "discover America" even from a Eurocentric perspective because others were first. Those other early settlements died out; Columbus changed everything.