Scott Fahlman, professor at the Department of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University, had a proposal to distinguish serious and funny messages on the institution’s message board with signs. He invented symbols ‘:-)’ and ‘:-(‘ that refer to facial expressions rotated in 90 degrees. These signs would spread worldwide with time, and the genre of smileys would be established. Initially, smileys would refer to unserious things, and they were only used among computer professionals but it caught on in the entire world.

Below is Scott Fahlman’s original message that was retrieved after twenty years it had been written, and reproduced from the magnetic tapes containing the saved messages posted on the message board.