Today in history: Origin of the Emoticon :-)

Eighteen years ago today: this guy invented the emoticon, specifically the sideways smiley.

(WARNING: Lengthy parentheticals ahead.)

While the rest of us were preoccupied with the Cold War, Atari, PacMan, Michael Jackson, E.T., John W. Hinkley and Penn State Football (The Nittany Lions won the Fiesta Bowl and the NCAA Championship, and JoePa had been head coach for a mere 17 years), there was a technological revolution afoot. Read more about (1982 here and here and here. Go ahead, it’s Friday, you know you wanna.)

This was the era of the Commodore 64 computer and Digital’s Rainbow dual processor. (My college computer lab had Rainbows when I arrived there in 1985.)  (KIDS, this was waaaaay back before you were even born -  there was only one room of computers on the whole campus – we did not all have skinny little wireless laptops that could be operated anywhere.  Sometimes, we had to wait in line for our turn on the computer.  We shared. Ask your parents; they’ll back me up.) The very first IBM PCs had just rolled of the assembly line. Microsoft released MS-DOS version 1.1 to IBM, for the IBM-PC, and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) — something we take for granted until someone tells us to go to “Run” and type “CMD” — had just been invented. Lotus Development unveiled its new spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, at a trade show.   The computer mouse had just been invented.

Thanks, man! :-)