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! :-)
Filed under: 1980s, Life-changing Gadgets, Memories, Minutiae, dated references, humor | Tagged: 1982, computers, computing, emoticon, Scott Fahlman, sideways smiley
Yep, I suppose one can point to this day in American history as a watershed moment in the further decline of the English language. As an English major, I should be appalled. But that’s not the way I roll.
Instead, I’ve attached the following short glossary of useful emoticons. They’re equal parts handy and irrelevant.
You’re welcome. ;)
HAPPY, SMILING, LAUGHING
:-) smiling; agreeing
:-D laughing
|-) hee hee
|-D ho ho
:-> hey hey
;-) so happy, I’m crying
:’-) crying with joy
\~/ full glass; my glass is full
TEASING, MISCHIEVOUS
;-) winking; just kidding
‘-) winking; just kidding
;-> devilish wink
:*) clowning
:-T keeping a straight face
AFFIRMING, SUPPORTING
:^D “Great! I like it!”
8-] “Wow, maaan”
:-o “Wow!”
^5 high five
^ thumbs up
:] Gleep, a friendly midget who wants
to befriend you
(::()::) bandaid; offering help or support
UNHAPPY, SAD
:-( frowning; boo hoo
:( sad
:-:-:- bitingly sarcastic
TRYING TO COMMUNICATE
:-& tonguetied
:-S incoherent
:-\ undecided
:- I “hmmm…”
:-, “hmmm ”
:-# “My lips are sealed”
:-X “My lips are sealed”
:-Y a quiet aside
:-” pursing lips
:-W speaking with forked tongue
:( ) can’t stop talking
FEELING STUPID OR TIRED
:~/ mixed up
%-) braindead
(:I egghead
What?
:@ What?
:Q What?
:-o “uhh oh!” OR surprise
;-) sardonic incredulity
:O shocked
8-| eyes wide with surprise
:-/ skeptical
8-O “Omigod!!”
:-C just totally unbelieving
|-{ “Good Grief!” (Charlie Brown)
I can remember programming Mad Libs on my commodore64 using BASIC then saving them to my *cassette deck* tape drive. What a dork (:I
Curt – thanks for that – I’ll start sprinkling these throughout my electronic correspondence!
Belly – GEEK!! I learned to write a Basic loop on the very first Apple computer in like 9th grade. Also: GEEK.
In fact, waaaaaay back then, some of us told our parents we preferred a typwriter to a computer as a going-to-college present since computers were intimidating and typewriters were state-of-the-art with little LCD displays that showed you the whole line of text you’d just typed, so that before you hit “return,” you could correct errors on that line. GENIUS technology, I tell you. Genius.
I wrote a choose-your-own adventure game in BASIC on the uni mainframe. The challenge was to try to get the black and white screen consoles to play it on, rather than the green ones, cos green looked old-fashioned.
They wouldn’t let us kids program the Apple ][e at high school, since the Math staff used it to play games all the time.
There were no computers in primary school.
Mommytime – see my previous entry with a huge parenthetical (my specialty) about my typewriter: http://soupisnotafingerfood.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/my-old-palm-pilot-may-it-rest-in-peace/
Gully – I learned to write simple loops and command lines that would display in COLOR. Woooot!
Senior year at the college of which my soupy friend speaks, I too waited in line for a computer……finally got onto said computer and was writing my paper on pre-revolution Ethiopia and what lead to the downfall of Halle Selassie, and yes I was bored too, played with the font, and ended up with a font so LARGE only 2 letters were on each page. Scarier still, was that the page on the computer displayed a “d” followed by a “b”. What pre-revolutionary word could that be??? I had a spelling error in a now over 5,000 page report! I had to get an extension from the prof. because even the Technos studs couldn’t figure out what I had done. This did not bode well for my tech future. :/.
ha ha ha. this is very educational – both the history lesson and curt’s crib sheet for emoticons. Even *I* (another English major who should be appalled but, much like my love for bad reality t.v., am sadly not. umm, pretend I’m doing a STUDY of language changes in history. yah, a study!)
I am :~/ , :-W and yet I :( )
Have fun translating. Thanks, Curt!
BTW on hemmoroids and leaking fluids, umm
|-{ “ and eww. : – (
finally, i just noticed this: :] Gleep, a friendly midget who wants
to befriend you. like omg. that’s like totally my logo and I DO, I do wanna befriend you.
xoxo, gleep, aka washy.