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On September 19, 1982 Carnegie Mellon University Computer science Research Assistant Professor Scott Fahlman Posted a message To the university’s bulletin board program that would later come to shape how people interacted Communicates connected.
His suggestion: Use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments.
While Falman describes himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face ExpressionsThe full story reveals something much more interesting than a single moment of genius.
The whole episode began three days ago when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to his colleagues on Carnegie Mellon University’s “bboard,” which was an early online message board. the Discussion topic He was exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.
That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a funny message titled “Warning!” He claimed that the elevator was “contaminated with mercury” and suffered “some minor fire damage” due to a physics experiment. Despite explanatory posts suggesting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.
The incident sparked immediate debate about how to prevent such misunderstandings and the “flame wars” (heated arguments) that can result from misreading intentions.
“This problem has led some of us to suggest (only half-seriously) that perhaps it would be a good idea to clearly label posts that should not be taken seriously,” Falman said. He wrote later In a retrospective post published on his CMU website. “After all, when using text communications over the Internet, we lack the body language or tone of voice cues that convey this information when we speak in person or on the phone.”
On September 17, 1982, the day after a misunderstanding at Carnegie Mellon’s board of directors, Swartz made his first concrete proposal: “Perhaps we should adopt an agreement to place a star…
In the subject field of any notification it may be considered a joke.”
Within hours, several computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University offered alternative proposals. Joseph Ginder suggested using % instead of *. Anthony Stentz suggested a neat system: “How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?” Keith Wright defended the ampersand (&), arguing that it “looks funny” and “sounds funny”. Leonard Hamey suggested {#} because it “looks like two lips with teeth between them.”
Meanwhile, some Carnegie Mellon users were already using their own solution. A group on the Gandalf VAX system later revealed that they were using \__/ as “universally known as a smiley” to mark jokes. But it appears to have not spread beyond this local system.
The winning formula
Two days after Swartz’s initial suggestion, Fahlman entered the discussion with his now-famous post: “I propose that the following letter sequence be used for joke tags: 🙂 Read it aside.” Serious messages could be used :-(, he added, noting that “we should probably label things that aren’t a joke, given current trends.”
What made Falman’s proposal successful was not that he invented the concept of joke marks, but rather that Swartz did. It wasn’t that he invented smiley codes at Carnegie Mellon, since \__/ already existed. Instead, Falman has assembled the best elements from the ongoing discussion: the simplicity of one-letter propositions, the visual clarity of face-like symbols, the principle of lateral reading alluded to by Hammy {#}, and a complete binary system covering both humor 🙂 and serious :-(.