:-) turns 25 tomorrow

On September 19th, 1982 the first ASCII smiley face was sent, closely followed by first frown. It was sent by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman. In fact, the email was eventually recovered from backup tapes (yes, tapes), and here's the actual text:

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

:-(

Nowadays these ASCII representations are old hat, replaced by graphical emoticons such as and . Without these emoticons, it would be impossible to express sentiment and emotion in email, and a lot of us would get into trouble when we were really just trying to be funny. :-)