Furiousmind

While Alexandra has the task of writing the more serious and useful stuff (see previous post), I entitle myself as the person who writes the superfluous and useless posts.To honour the title I’ve just designated for myself, I write this post to tell you that the smiley :-) was first used by professor Scott E. Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University (see picture above). Fahlman posted it in a message to an online bulletin board at 11:44 AM on September 19, 1982. Here is Scott’s original post:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman

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

:-(

You can find much more information about this fact in this Mike Jone’s page.

If you didn’t know this, you can now impress your friends by telling them this useless, yet interesting, piece of information :-)