Fwd: E-mail Emoticons, 20 Years Old!

["Lisa C. Thomas" <lisa.thomas@YALE.EDU>]

Thought this might be of interest...
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 The following article (below) appeared in Software Development
magazine, October 2002; Volume 3, Number 10. 

We all use "emoticons" in e-mail at some time or another so I
thought that you might be interested in knowing how it all got started.
The "smiley" :-) was invented 20 years ago on September 19,
2002. How do we know that? The URL given in the article shows a
fascinating e-mail discussion/thread which lead to the birth of the
smiley.

 
 Twenty years ago, the emoticon was born in a fit of whimsy-but
proving its origins wasn't so easy. 

What's the latest addition to the computing history archives? The
original e-mail by former Carnegie Mellon University researcher Scott
Fahlman proposing the smiley emoticon. It all started 20 years ago, when
a joke posted on the CMU bulletin board claimed that a physics experiment
run amok had contaminated an elevator with mercury and caused a fire.
Much confusion ensued over the false alarm, prompting the idea of
explicitly marking humorous posts. After the *, %, *%, &, {#} (the
last to represent teeth exposed between lips) were all proposed, Fahlman
suggested the sequence of characters that was to become the smiley. (You
can read the thread that led to this momentous invention at
http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Joke_Thread.html.)

Twenty years later, however, hunting down emoticon history proved curiously challenging. 
"There had been a couple of earlier attempts to find my original smiley post on our archive tapes, but all had run into problems," says Fahlman. "I had given up on this." But Mike Jones, now a researcher in the systems and networking group at Microsoft Research-and a CMU graduate student at the time of the post-wanted to make one more serious attempt. "He viewed this as an important piece of Internet history, and really thought it would be worth the effort to dig up the old files-something that I would have been embarrassed to claim," Fahlman recalls. 

"I kicked off the effort in February 2002 by looking through some old b-board program (Bags) sources, figuring out the filename that the post would likely be found under," says Jones. Unearthing the first smiley hinged on finding a working nine-track tape drive and a machine to use it on, then going through volumes of backup tapes. Jones' team retrieved the original post on September 10, 2002. It read: 
 

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) 
From: Scott E Fahlman 
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  

 :-( 
 

Future Forays 
If finding a 20-year-old e-mail took more than six months, how will other archeological digs fare? The challenges lie primarily in the archiving of the environments in which the documents were created, rather than the actual information itself. Archived documents must be available, retrievable, accessible and readable. This requires access to archaic formats, operating systems, browsers and, in the case of smiley, hardware-all of which change constantly. 

The complex nature of scientific documents and experimental data adds an additional wrinkle to the problem. The European Physical Society, for example, recently recommended that "not only an image of the original document be archived, but also the full information necessary to restore the content in any future representation." Thus, archives should include not only a PDF or Postscript file, but also any accompanying XML, MathML, LaTex or other data descriptions. Although historians recognize the need for standardized approaches, we're still a long way from determining how electronic information is best stored and retrieved. You can burn your e-mails to a CD-ROM today, but will you still have a copy of Lotus Notes and an optical drive in 20 years?    -Rosalyn Lum

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Lisa C. Thomas

Access Services Supervisor

Cross Campus Library, Yale University

203.432.1871

lisa.thomas@yale.edu

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