Smiley Faces or emoticons are the important part of our daily life. We use this in chat and sms. Yesterday, It has completed its 30 years.
Smiley came into existence on September 19, 1982. It was first used by a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman on an online bulletin board.
Text based conversation lacks body language and expression. So smiley was introduced to bring expression into conversation.
“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,” Fahlman explained in a post on Carnegie Mellon’s website about the invention of the sideways smile
“The problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously,” he added.
You can read the original post by Scott Fahlman Here.