Scott Fahlman invented the :-) smiley at Carnegie Mellon in 1982, three days after a joke mercury-spill warning was taken seriously

It started with a physics puzzle about falling elevators. On September 16, 1982, Neil Swartz asked the Carnegie Mellon bulletin board what would happen to a lit candle and a drop of mercury if an elevator’s cable snapped. A few hours later, Howard Gayle posted a reply with the subject line “WARNING!”

“Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury. There is also some slight fire damage. Decontamination should be complete by 08 Friday.”

It was a joke. Not everybody read it that way. That night Rudy Nedved posted that the mercury notice “is not an actual problem,” apologized “for spoiling the joke but people were upset,” and pointed out that parts of Doherty Hall had actually been closed the year before over spilled mercury. The next morning Swartz confirmed there was no spill, wrote that “Many people seem to have taken the notice about the physics department seriously,” and suggested putting a star in the subject line of anything meant as a joke.

The full thread turned into a design meeting for punctuation. Someone wanted % instead of *. Someone else made the case that “&” was “the funniest character on the keyboard,” because it “looks like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter.” Leonard Hamey pitched {#}, two lips with teeth showing.

Then, at 11 a.m. on September 19, Fahlman posted this:

“I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(”

For years, nobody could show the original. Fahlman writes that he “didn’t keep a copy of my original post,” and several earlier searches of old backup tapes came up empty.

The search that worked started in February 2002, kicked off by Mike Jones of Microsoft, who dug through old bulletin-board source code to figure out the likely filename. The credits on the thread page run long. Dave Livingston found “a working 9-track tape drive and a machine to use it on,” a grad student’s FreeBSD box read the old 4.1BSD dump format, and Jeff Baird kept requesting more tapes until he pulled the thread off the “spice vax oct-82 backup tape” on September 10, 2002. Fahlman calls it “the Digital Coelacanth Project.” The post came back nine days before its 20th birthday.

Fahlman has mixed feelings about the whole thing. He writes that “Perhaps the E-mail smiley face has done more to degrade our written communication than to improve it,” and of software that swaps :-) for a little picture, “Personally, I think this destroys the whimsical element of the original.”

Every phone keyboard now does what he disliked, swapping the typed characters for a little picture. Whether a yellow face carries a joke better than three characters read sideways is something that 1982 bulletin board never had to settle.