Recently, I was gazing at the overly cheery angelic mug on my chat window, and I thought, “Who in the world would create such syntactical abomination?” But seriously, I really wanted to know. After digging through the all knowing hive mind known simply as Google, I happened upon a faint whiff of the dank laboratory where these little smiling monsters had been concocted.

I was led to the story of Scott E. Fahlman, who constructed the beasts in an attempt to dull the sarcastic and witty remarks of the computer geeks at Carnegie Mellon. After a long session in which the merits and demerits of a humor system were debated, the board came to the conclusion that such a system was indeed necessary:

18-Sep-82 20:40    Guy Steele at CMU-10A        ! Joke markers again

I hope everyone realized that my previous remark about non-use of joke markerswas a joke, and was flagged as such by the

absence of a marker. This message is not a joke, as indicated

by the exclamation point.

Eventually, Falhman made his fateful suggestion:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman :-)From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

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   

:-(

=

Intrigued, I shot him an email (filled with questions of course), to which he has so graciously responded.

The question we all want to know. What is your favorite emoticon?

I like the two I invented: :-) and :-( Of course, I’m a bit biased. I also like the winy: ;-)

At what point did you know that the smiley phenomenon was big?

It was a very gradual process. The idea spread very quickly through the Carnegie Mellon CS community, and withing a few weeks to the few other research universities and companies that were on the Arpanet in 1982. But there it has to stop — for a while. If by “big” you mean “widely used by the general public”, that didn’t happen until the 1990s, when the Internet finally made it into people’s homes.

As a lover of old computers, I recently profiled one on Micahville.com. Naturally, I am interested in the technology involved, both originally, and in the retrieving of the files. Care to describe it?

In those days, CMU CSD had a couple of big timesharing systems (Decsystem-10s) and maybe 10 or so time-shared Vax/Unix systems that were used by various projects. These were networked and regularly backed up. Some of us had high-priced personal machines in our offices — sometime around then I got a Symbolics Lisp Machine. But when reading mail or newsgroups, we almost all used ASCII terminals. The ADM-3a was one popular model, and probably was the thing I typed the smiley post on.

I wasn’t deeply involved in the 2002 effort to find the original post on our old backup tapes. The key was that Mike Jones (CMU alum at Microsoft Research) pushed for this. As a grad student Mike had been in charge of backups on some of the Vax systems, and he had a good idea what to look for and where to find it. Once the proper tapes were found, our facilities people had to find an old tape drive that could read them, and then had to find the proper drivers and come up with a way of emulating the old systems that could run those drivers. It was a very impressive effort.

Do you think that perhaps the e-mail smiley face has done more to degrade our written communication than to improve it?

It’s not meant to improve serious kinds of communication or serious literature. For quick and dirty notes, I think it serves a useful purpose. But it certainly can be abused.

What are you currently working on now?

I’m working on symbolic knowledge representation, embodied in a system called Scone. We’re trying to get out an open-source system that will be a useful tool in many applications that require some level of common sense or background knowledge. Read all about it at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/scone/

I just downloaded the latest Firefox trunk, and for me (on Linux), it got a new icon theme.  If I change to a different GNOME theme, Firefox seems to adjust to the new theme based on specific GNOME settings.  As of December 2, 2007, the Windows version of the trunk does not have any theme/visual improvements since older trunk versions.  Try and download it here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

None of this seems final though, but it does look great :-)

I chuckle:

	from	Koffi Anan <unitedsection-nation1@hotmail.com>
reply-to		secretary.anan1@sify.com,
to
date		Nov 24, 2007 4:22 AM
subject		US$ 500,000,00 BENEFICIARY.REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654
mailed-by		hotmail.com

Attention:My good friend,

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you.

No, I don’t. Why would Koffi Anan contact me, worry about my family, and call me good friend?

We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$ 500,000.

I LOVE CAPITAL LETTERS…

This includes every foriegn contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government probelms etc.We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.

Good Job, Koffi. I love your spelling.

You are advised to contact Alhaji Ahmad Jassim Mohammed of ZENITH BANK NIGERIA PLC, as he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your Cheque/ International Bank Draft of USD$500,000. This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.

Shady. Already Nigerians are known for shady business regarding trying to steal money from Americans. Like me.

Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number/your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.Conatct Alhaji Ahmad Jassim Mohammed immediately for your Cheque:

Person to Contact:Alhaji Abduallah Musa.
Email:dr.abdullahalmusa@yahoo.co.uk

Loving the email address..

Phone:234-8077441402.

How do I even call this phone number? It is not properly formed..

Thanks and God bless you and your family.Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft.Making the world a better place.

Regards,
Mr.David Thomas.
Former Secretary (UNITED NATIONS).

Wait. I thought Koffi Anan was writing me this email. What?

Just a quick post to tell everyone to try out the latest build of Firefox 3 that incorporates many new features, security, and bug fixes. More information here: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2007/11/20/firefox-3-beta-1-ready-for-testing/

The great people over at Google Operating System have released a screenshot that shows a testing version of Gmail that includes the default Google Talk panel on the left, but also with AOL Instant Messanger Integration. Here’s the screenshot:

Here is the post