I actually have a vague memory of the first time I realized that the couple of characters that were appearing before me on the screen were meant to represent a smiley face turned sideways. It was some time in the mid 90s in Boulder, CO. Boulder Valley School District had a program for students to request an account on a System V server that was being hosted up at the University of Colorado campus in the engineering center. A bunch of us had gotten accounts and were exchanging emails with the pine email client. A friend sent me an email that included ":)". Since I was using a terminal program to view emails, I had grown accustomed to seeing various control or syntax characters being printed out for different reasons. I assumed what I was seeing was something like that. Perhaps a control character that was meant to control bold font being accidentally printed out. Eventually, I realized it was a smiley face.
My recollection is even more vague, but I think it was when trying out early versions of Linux and browsing the documentation. I, too, probably had a fleeting thought of "weird control characters, must be a UNIX thing", before it finally hit me. I don't remember when and where exactly, but I do remember the sudden realization.
> Shakespeare’s work is full of clichés and his spelling was atrocious. :-)
How could you not be aware that spelling was not standardized at the time? Does this person know nothing about the history of the English language?
/s and :) should be obvious here, but I am including them anyway, just to be safe. I don't want to be accused of old fashioned trolling, and starting a flame war.
> /s and :) should be obvious here, but I am including them anyway, just to be safe. I don't want to be accused of old fashioned trolling, and starting a flame war.
If so you should be denoting it with the appropriate ~= sign:
IIRC, Wittgenstein describes the usage of type to create a smile face in one of his writings and provides an example (I want to say I saw this in Culture and Value, a collection released in 1970). He died in 1951.
This is of course, not to throw shade on the authors claim to original invention. I believe that without doubt :)
> Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.
Fortunately, in ASCII we have a neutral spot between ( and ). I present to you the neutral marker: :-|
At one point, new-on-the-scene O'Reilly Books put out a very small book of "smileys," including buttons. I want to say 1992 or 1993. I wonder if I still have it.
