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It’s a birthday that all of us can celebrate. Today the smiley face formed by tying a colon, hyphen, and parentheses is 25 years old. At 11:44 AM on September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman typed the symbol on an early online message board, proposing that be used to to denote a comment meant to be taken lightly.

Now known as emoticons, these smiley faces have dozens of different variations, and messaging programs like AOL Instant Messenger transform into a colorful figure that can be customized. I have Groucho Marx smiley faces. Pretty cool stuff.

Smiley faces have even crept into more formal business-related communications as the New York Times notes:

Continue reading Happy 25th birthday instant message smiley face!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 7:21 am and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.