In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon

Recovered messages you can read hereshow how the emoji was jointly developed – not a lone moment of genius, but an ongoing conversation that suggests, refines and develops the group's ideas. Fahlman had no idea that his synthesis would become a fundamental part of how people express themselves in digital text, but neither did Schwartz, who first proposed joke tagging, or Gandalf VAX users, who were already using their own smile symbols.

From smiley to emoji

While Falman's text emoticons spread throughout Western online culture and remained text-based for a long time, Japanese mobile phone users developed a parallel system in the late 1990s: smileyFor many years, Shigetaka Kurita 1999 set for NTT, DoCoMo was widely cited as the original. However, recent discoveries have revealed an earlier origin. SoftBank released image-based character set on mobile phones in 1997, and Sharp PA-8500 Back in 1988, you could select icons in your personal organizer.

Unlike emoticons, which required side-to-side reading, emoji were small pictographic images that could convey emotions, objects, and ideas in more detail. When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010 and Apple added the emoji keyboard to iOS in 2011, the format gained global adoption. Today, emoticons have largely replaced emoticons in everyday communication, although Fahlman's sideways faces still appear regularly in text messages and social media posts.

As Fahlman himself notes on his website, he may not have been “the first person to ever type those three letters in a row.” Others, including teletype operators and private correspondents, may have used similar symbols before 1982, and perhaps even how far back like 1648. Author Vladimir Nabokov proposed Until 1982, it was believed that “there must be a special typographic sign for a smile.” And the original IBM PC included special emoticon back in 1981 (perhaps this should be considered the first emoji).

What made Fahlman's contribution significant was not absolute originality, but rather offering the right solution at the right time and in the right context. From there, the smiley face can spread throughout the evolving global computer network, and no one will ever get the joke wrong again. 🙂