:-) Turns 25

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.
Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E Fahlman asserts he was the first to use the
three keystrokesa colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesisas a
horizontal smiling face :-) in a computer message, says AP in a report.

And to mark the anniversary, Fahlman and his colleagues are
starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted,
person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo, carries a
$500 cash prize.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic
bulletin board at 11:44 am on 19 September, 1982, during a discussion about the
limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.
"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),"
wrote Fahlman.

Carnegie Mellon said Fahlmans smileys spread from its campus
to other universities, then businesses, and eventually around the world as the
Internet gained popularity. However, computer science and linguistics professors
said they were unaware of who first used the symbol.

"Ive never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence
was in use before my original post, and Ive never run into anyone who
actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the
universitys Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But its always
possible that someone else had the same ideaits a simple and obvious idea,
after all."

And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs
that dont translate keystrokes into colorful graphics.

Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces
intended to express emotions. Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of
languageto enable people to express emotion, but the emotion behind a written
sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone
of voice.

Compiled by Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in