Fascinating facts about the smiley face
March 9th 2009 19:05
The story of the invention of the text smiley face, possibly the most recognisable of all the novelties of the internet age, was lost until 2002 when an American researcher tracked down the inventor, and the message in which he used it.
The researcher's name is Mike Jones. He was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s, and he had a theory that the first ever text smiley face appeared on the university's bulletin board. Bulletin boards were a popular early manifestation of the internet, and Jones set out, in 2002, to see if he could trace the birth of the smiley about 20 years earlier.
After what Jones himself described as "a significant effort to locate it", the original post, made by Scott Fahlman on the CMU CS general bboard (Carneegie Mellon University Computer Science general bulletin board) was retrieved on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape.
To find the original post, Jones had first to look through old bulletin board program sources, known as Bags, to determine a filename that the post might be found under. The filename was eventually found to be /usr/cmu/lib/bb/general.bb). Jones then asked Howard Wactlar, the former School of Computer Sciences facilities director, whether the file could be restored. Scott Fahlman himself provided data narrowing the probable span of time during which the post was made. Wactlar and Bob Cosgrove, the current director, determined that backup tapes from that period (1981-1983) still existed and asked Jeff Baird of the facilities staff to try to find and restore the post. Dave Livingston of facilities located a working nine-track tape drive and a machine to use it on. Kirk Berthold and Michael Riley in CS operations managed retrieving tapes from off-site archival storage. Graduate student Dan Pelleg's FreeBSD machine was used to read the 4.1BSD dump format tapes using a compatibility mode in the restore program.
According to Mike Jones, Jeff Baird should get most of the credit for doing the hard work of locating and retrieving the data. "He kept asking for more tapes, reading those that could still be read, narrowing the date range, and sticking with it until the post was found," said Jones.
The original post by Scott Fahlman read:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman : - )
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
: - )
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use : - (
Note: Spaces have been inserted in the smilies in Fahlman's original message. In a sign of the times, the Orble blogging interface would turn them into graphical smilies if they were written without the spaces.
Fahlman's bulletin board post was part of an ongoing dialogue about the problem of humorous or ironic posts not being understood as such, with possible negative consequences. Other methods had been suggested (such as writing "Joke" or [J]) but had been rejected. Fahlman's elegant solution was in use on bulletin boards around the world within a few years.
research.microsoft.com, news.medill.northwestern.edu, en.wikipedia.com, www.straightdope.com
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Comment by Janet Collins
Acceptable Etiquette
The Social Critic
Janet Collins Blog
Interesting that not only one but two people went to so much trouble t resurrect it. I'm very glad they did ..
Comment by Chris Champion
LettersToNorm
moneywhither
Vyoos
Zoomies
Bloggercises
The Blog of Lists
Newly Old
It's interesting, isn't it, to consider the smiley as historically important. It's easy to think of it as frivolous - I have done often enough - but it was created for a serious reason, and it's now so universally used that, sociallogically, it would be a tragedy not to know its history.