On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online.
His proposal: use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments.
While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor … or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.
The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon’s “bboard,” which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.
That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” He claimed that an elevator had been “contaminated with mercury” and suffered “some slight fire damage” due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.
The incident sparked immediate discussion about how to prevent such misunderstandings and the “flame wars” (heated arguments) that could result from misread intent.
“This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously,” Fahlman later wrote in a retrospective post published on his CMU website. “After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone.”
On September 17, 1982, the next day after the misunderstanding on the CMU bboard, Swartz made the first concrete proposal: “Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke.”
Within hours, multiple Carnegie Mellon computer scientists weighed in with alternative proposals. Joseph Ginder suggested using % instead of *. Anthony Stentz proposed a nuanced system: “How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?” Keith Wright championed the ampersand (&), arguing it “looks funny” and “sounds funny.” Leonard Hamey suggested {#} because “it looks like two lips with teeth showing between them.”
Meanwhile, some Carnegie Mellon users were already using their own solution. A group on the Gandalf VAX system later revealed they had been using \__/ as “universally known as a smile” to mark jokes. But it apparently didn’t catch on beyond that local system.
The Winning Formula
Two days after Swartz’s initial proposal, Fahlman entered the discussion with his now famous post: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: 🙂 Read it sideways.” He added that serious messages could use :-(, noting, “Maybe we should mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.”
What made Fahlman’s proposal work wasn’t that he invented the concept of joke markers—Swartz had done that. It wasn’t that he invented smile symbols at Carnegie Mellon, since the \__/ already existed. Rather, Fahlman synthesized the best elements from the ongoing discussion: the simplicity of single-character proposals, the visual clarity of face-like symbols, the sideways-reading principle hinted at by Hamey’s {#}, and a complete binary system that covered both humor 🙂 and seriousness :-(.
