That originated in a conversation posted to a CMU message thread dated September 16, 1982. Fahlman suggested the sequence as a way to designate a post as one with humorous intent, presumably for the humor-impaired.

Fahlman’s Yahoo interview noted how the concept quickly spread to other message board users. People began to create new smileys, like ones indicating surprise, or even renditions of people like the Pope or Abraham Lincoln.

“It was gratifying that my colleagues found the idea so amusing, but I figured that it would stop there and would gradually fade away as the novelty wore off,” Fahlman said.

It didn’t, instead becoming a feature on messaging clients like Yahoo’s, AOL’s, and others after the Internet began reaching a broader commercial audience in the 1990s.

Fahlman isn’t really a fan of the heavily-animated smileys seen on rich messaging clients today. He would like to have one that truly captures emotion, like Munch’s “The Scream,” he said in the interview.

“When deadlines are looming and things are going wrong, I

Wouldn’t it have been funny if the explorers found that the meteorite had landed on a copy of ’52nd Street’? If it did, someone could have posted the story on a BBS, and if they’d seen this post, the user may have been inspired to add a to the story.

Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, serious people used serious computer systems to perform research and to communicate, after a fashion. Being serious types, the introduction of humor into a discussion merited, well, further discussion.

It all started when people at Carnegie Mellon University experienced confusion when posts about mercury in an elevator didn’t clearly note the post was a joke. One person, Neil Swartz, suggested marking jokes with a (*) in the subject line. Scott Fahlman, who very evidently possessed a sense of humor, responded:

17-Sep-82 13:04 Scott Fahlman at CMU-10A Elevators (*) Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the elevator…

Unfortunately, the center elevator now contains what seems to be the remains of 40,000 two-pound pigeons in an advanced state of decomposition and the right elevator contains a bear of indeterminate color. The left elevator appears to be safe, but when you stand in it for too long, your voice gets squeaky and you start running into the walls, causing the elevator to rise. Despite the * in the header of this message, this is not a joke and should be taken quite literally. Do not panic — taking the stairs is good for you.

Other suggestions were made by the learned contributors from CMU: *%, &, # (with a lengthy justification for it). And then Fahlman invented the smiley:

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

The frowning smiley would have been appropriate for some other computer related research performed in 1982. At Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center (which invented the GUI, not Apple, by the way), two researchers developed the first computer worm; it was an experiment in parallel processing, not the malicious threats we know 23 years later.