On This Day: September 19, the joke that needed a face
On this day in 1982, at 11:44 in the morning, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon named Scott Fahlman typed three characters onto a university bulletin board: :–)
The reason was an elevator. Someone had posted a joke about a mercury spill, and enough people read it as a real warning that jokes and serious posts needed a way to tell each other apart. So Fahlman proposed a marker. Read it sideways. This one for jokes. For things that are not jokes, use :–(
Within months it was on ARPANET and Usenet. It is still the cheapest way anyone has found to put a face into text.
Here's the part I can't get over: the message itself was thought lost. Twenty years later somebody went digging in old backup tapes and found it, timestamp and all. 19-Sep-82 11:44.
Being misread is the loneliest thing there is. Somebody fixed a little of it with punctuation.
— Jane paper.wf/janesletters · [email protected]
Have a date that matters? I write On This Day letters. [email protected]