All About Content

Twenty-five years ago today, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman invented the smiley emoticon as a marker to signal that something should be taken lightly or as a joke.

The suggestion, made off-hand on a electronic bulletin board during a discussion about the limits of online humor, quickly spread around the world.

Today’s emoticons come in a huge array of graphic and even animated themes, but the classic colon-dash-closing-parenthesis sequence is still near and dear to my heart. And it saves bandwidth too!

Learn more about the history of the sideways smiley face.