The Inventor of Emoticons
January 7th, 2008Recently, 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