🤯 How a Dumb Physics Joke Blew Up and Created the First Emoticon
Dude, check this out. It’s the story of how that little smiley face :-)—the OG emoticon—actually came to life back in 1982. It wasn't some huge company or fancy startup; it was literally a bunch of smart people at a university trying not to fight online.
The Problem: When Jokes Go Wrong
Picture this: It's September 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). They had this internal message board, kind of like a super-early, text-only Reddit, called the "bboard."
The whole mess started with a simple physics question. A computer scientist named Neil Swartz asked the group to think about what happens to stuff—specifically, a lit candle and a drop of mercury—inside a free-falling elevator. You know, pure science stuff.
But then, another guy, Howard Gayle, decided to be a smartass. He wrote a completely sarcastic "WARNING!" post, pretending that the hypothetical physics experiment had gone wrong and the elevator was now contaminated with mercury and had fire damage.
The problem? No one could tell it was a joke.
People panicked. Even after Gayle tried to clarify, some folks totally believed the warning. This kind of misunderstanding—where a joke gets taken seriously and everyone gets mad—was a huge issue. They called these online fights "flame wars."
The Search for a Fix
CMU was using these massive, old school computers (DEC mainframes) and terminals (like the DEC VT-100 or a DECSYSTEM-20). These machines were super limited; they could only display the basic US-ASCII set, which is just 95 printable characters (letters, numbers, and basic punctuation). No graphics, no emojis, no fancy stuff.
The argument immediately started: How do we mark a joke so everyone knows it’s not serious? As one professor, Scott Fahlman, put it, online, you can’t see the person's body language or hear their tone of voice.
The first real idea came from Neil Swartz (the dude who started the physics thread). On September 17, 1982, he suggested: Put an asterisk (*) in the subject line for a joke.
Suddenly, everyone jumped in with their own ideas:
* Joseph Ginder: Use a percent sign %.
* Anthony Stentz: Use * for good jokes, % for bad ones. (lol)
* Keith Wright: Use the ampersand & because it "looks funny" and "sounds funny."
* Leonard Hamey: Use {#} because it "looks like two lips with teeth showing." (A sideways face hint!)
Also, a separate group on a different CMU system (the Gandalf VAX) was already using __/ to mark smiles, but that one didn't really spread.
The Winning Post
Finally, two days later, on September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, a research professor, dropped the winning proposal.
He used all the limitations and earlier suggestions and made it simple:
> "I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways."
>
He immediately added the perfect partner: :-( for things that were serious or not jokes. He even joked, "Maybe we should mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends."
Why Fahlman’s version won:
* It was a face: You could see the eyes, nose, and mouth just by turning your head.
* It was simple: It used only the basic ASCII punctuation characters that every terminal in the network could display.
* It was a complete system: You got a symbol for happy (:-)) and a symbol for sad/serious (:-(). It covered both bases.
From CMU to the Internet (The ARPAnet)
The idea spread like crazy. The CMU students and faculty were all connected to the ARPAnet, which was the OG network that would eventually become the Internet.
Less than two months later, people at other major research hubs, like Xerox PARC, were already talking about and using the smiley. Over time, it got simplified to just :) and :( because people are lazy (in a good way). What started as a weird, internal CMU joke fix became a fundamental part of online communication.
The Missing Tapes
Here's a weird fact: For decades, the original messages were actually LOST.
CMU moved systems and deleted the old bulletin board posts. The whole story just existed in people's memories.
But around 2001-2002, a former CMU guy at Microsoft sponsored this massive "digital archaeology" project. They had to find old backup tapes from 1982, find a working tape drive that could even read the ancient media, and then decode the old file formats. They actually succeeded and recovered the original thread!
The recovery proved Fahlman wasn't a "lone genius." He just took the best ideas from a three-day community brainstorming session and boiled it down to the perfect, simple solution.
Emoticon vs. Emoji
* Emoticon (:-)): Text-based, read sideways, pioneered by Fahlman/CMU.
* Emoji (😀): Small picture/graphic-based, developed later in the late 1990s in Japan for mobile phones (starting with NTT DoCoMo and SoftBank).
While we use emoji way more now, the original text-based emoticons are still hanging around. They paved the way for every single reaction we share online. And funnily enough, IBM's computers actually had a dedicated smiley character as far back as 1981, but Fahlman’s contribution was taking the idea and making it viral across a network.
So, next time you send a joke online and throw a :) at the end, remember it’s all thanks to a bunch of nerds in 1982 who couldn't handle a bad physics joke!
Want me to look up any of the original computer systems, like the DECSYSTEM-20, to see what they looked like?
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