In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon
Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment. The whole episode started three days earlier when computer…
