Today, everybody knows that combination of a colon, dash and parenthesis is a smiley face. Until 32 years ago this week, that's all it was, a series of nonsensical punctuation. Then, Scott Fahlman, a ...

Happy birthday to the emoticon -- the sideways smiley-face that changed the way we communicate emotion online.Consisting of three keyboard strokes (colon, hyphen, close parentheses), the popular ...

Can emoticons affect relationships? After 30 years of using them, we decide to have a look at the power of emoticons... It's impossible for some people to go a single text or email without including a ...

In the early days of the internet, computer scientist Scott Fahlman ran into a problem on Carnegie Mellon University’s online bulletin boards. People used the bulletin boards — a kind of primitive ...

The sideways "smiley face", often referred to as the first emoticon, turns thirty years old today. Scott E. Fahlman came up with the idea during a bulletin board post on September 19, 1982 as a way to ...

October 29th marked the 40th anniversary of the Internet. We'll talk with Scott Fahlman, the computer researcher who invented the virtual smiley face, about how emoticons and abbreviations have ...