Smiley1: Wow…I’m old! :-!

Closecuz: What?!?!

Smiley1: Yeah, I just hit the big 20 last week!

Closecuz: Woohoo!!!! P.A.R.T.Y!

Smiley1: No man, I turned 20 not 21…?-)

Closecuz: 🙁

That’s right, on Sept. 19, 1982 Scott E. Fahlman created the first smiley-face (or emoticon), while writing with his friends on their newsgroup at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a recent National Public Radio interview, Fahlman said he and his friends were trying to create a way to rate jokes that they were sending back and forth, and figure out some kind of symbolic warning system to let each other know when the following message was not to be taken too seriously.

The symbols grew into a whole new language on the Internet was made available to the public in the early 1990s, and now you can’t get through more than a few e-mails without ’em! The little smiling faces aren’t always smilin’ however, over the past two decades they have evolved, and now cover the gambit of emotions from dazed :-x, to disturbed :-