Twenty-five years ago. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says he was the first to use three keystrokes _ a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis _ as a horizontal "smiley approach" in a computer message.
To mark the anniversary Wednesday. Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award sponsored by Yahoo Inc. carries a $500 change prize.
Language experts say the smiley approach and other emotional icons known as emoticons have given populate a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.
Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic air board at 11:44 a m on Sept. 19. 1982 during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denominate comments meant to be taken lightly.
The suggestion gave computer users a way to give humor or positive feelings with a smile _ or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
"I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) grade was in use before my original post and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea _ it's a simple and obvious idea after all."
Variations such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon emerged later. And today people can hardly create by mental act using computer chat programs that don't ingeminate keystrokes into colorful graphics said Ryan Stansifer a computer science professor at the Florida initiate of Technology.
"Now we have so much power we don't lay for a colon-dash-paren," he said. "You want the smiley face so all these chatting softwares have to have them."
"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters and how many have turned their heads to one align to view a smiley in the 25 years since this all started."
Amy Weinberg a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way both in business and academia populate communicate."
"In terms of things that language processing does you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything.. and you undergo a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley approach you better not take that seriously."
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language _ to enable people to convey emotion said Clifford Nass a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice he said.
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