:-)

Its been claimed that its 25 years since :-) was used for the first time. It is believed that twenty five years ago, a Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E. Fahlman was the first to use the three keystrokes (":", "-", ")") to represent a smiley in a message.
Since then the messaging industry has added so many emoticons, that it seems almost impossible to send a computer message without using an emoticons.
The creator of the original ASCII emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.

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

:-(

Below is the list of emoticons that GMail messenger supports.

<3       
:(|)        (It's a monkey!)
\m/        (Rock out)
:-o       
:D       
:(        
x-(       
B-)       
:'(        
=D      
;)         
:-|       
=)       
:-D      
;^)       
;-)       
:-)       
:-/       
:P       

Its news to me that GMail has so many emoticons. I just knew a hand full of them. Whatever said and done, Yahoo! still rules the net with respect to emoticons. I don't think any other messenger service offers such a wide spectrum of emoticons. Click here for a complete list of Yahoo! emoticons.

:)

(sources: cnn, Wikipedia.org, GMail Help)

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