Smiley emoticon marks 25 anniversary

Smiley emoticon appeared first in online bulletin board on September, 19 in 1982. Professor Scott E. Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University first used the smiley in an online discussion.

During a discussion professor Fahlman used a colon followed by hyphen and a parenthesis to suggest the emoticon that could denote a joke.

Later, the smiley became so popular that it became the most used emoticon to express emotions in electronic messages and e-mails. Language specialists consider the introduction of emoticons one of the greatest contributions in computer lexicon.

Professor Fahlman claimed to be the first to use the smiley-face emoticon however he admits that someone else could have come across this idea as it is very simple and obvious. Today professor together with his colleagues introduced The Smiley Award to students for technology innovations in computer communications.

Emoticons are used to express positive and negative emotions, humor and irony and help us convey the message more precisely. Written phrases lack emotions without emoticons and can be wrong understood. It delivers emotions that we usually express with our voice.

Nowadays the software progress introduced a huge range of emoticons that people could hardly imagine living without just 25 years ago.