Where did the emoticons come from? It is said that Scott Elliot Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, invented the first one. He created the first smiley emoticons that relied on a colon or a semi-colon followed by a closing paranthesis. as a tool to help vivitors of a message board at Carnegie Mellon to quickly distinguish between serious posts and those that were replies or jokes.
The original posting containing smiley faces was posted on September 19, 1982. Fahlman is still trying to prove that he is the inventor of these little smiley faces; he even went so far as to dig up his old postings on that message board. These symbols have caught on and usage spread throughout the world almost overnight. Smileys emoticons just seem to brighten a message better than anything else, and today, these have evolved beyond the smiley face to include all sorts of emotions. Now there are dozens, hundreds and even thousands of variations on the basic emoticons that can describe every emotion possible. Their popularity has even enabled the creation of such companies like Incredimail and Emotimail – just two of the more popular amongst hundreds – whose primary product and area of focus is emoticons. Along with screensavers and background images, thousands of sites now offer emoticons that you can download and use with your favorite email software. Yahoo messenger emoticons are also available and Microsoft has also implemented ‘emotions’ in windows messenger, and messenger plus.
Don’t you think its kind of cool to receive a message from a friend with a neat little caricature on it! So J and have a great day! ;)
