Happy 25th Birthday to :-)

Contest marks 25 years since professor hit keys to help us smile

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon :-)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.

To mark the anniversary today, 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 US$500 (HK$3,900) cash prize.

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11.44am on September 19, 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. "Read it sideways."

The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile - or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.

Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.

Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language - to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University.

"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.

09月19日 星期三 05:30AM
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