Smiley turns thirty

Emoticons today celebrate their 30th anniversary.

Professor Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has been widely credited with the originating of the first smiley emoticon, has lambasted his creation's more illustrative predecessors -- calling modern Emoticons and Emoji unattractive and unimaginative.

"I think they are ugly, and they ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express emotions using standard keyboard characters. But perhaps that's just because I invented the other kind," said Fahlman.

According to a 2007 report by CNN, Fahlman first posted the emoticon in a message on one of Carnegie Mellon's online bulletin boards at 11.44 a.m. on September 19, 1982.

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman at the time. "Read it sideways."

As Fahlman notes in his blog, the original aim of the emoticon was a straightforward one: to allow users on the university's bulletin boards to highlight posts that were meant to be humorous or sarcastic, but that might otherwise be misconstrued as serious.