Mackenzie's suggestion failed to catch on as his did. And he didn't have the turn-your-head-sideways idea.'' Dr. ''As far as I know, I'm the first one who did colon, minus, paren. Mackenzie, who seems to have disappeared from the computer scene. ''What he did was certainly an emoticon,'' Dr.
In 1979, for instance, Kevin Mackenzie, a member of a discussion group on the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet, made a similar suggestion. Fahlman was the first to come up with a typographical means of denoting emotion online. Such diligent sleuthing notwithstanding, it is doubtful that Dr. ''A lot of them are deteriorating, and it was approaching now or never.''
''We're archiving these tapes off-site, and we were curious to see if we could still read them,'' he said. Baird, who estimated that he spent an accumulated five days on the quest. Why expend all the time and effort? ''It was an interesting part of departmental history,'' said Mr. Eventually they tracked down the correct magnetic tapes and a corresponding tape drive, decoded the old formats and searched for the right character strings to find the actual posts. Jeff Baird, supervisor of Unix engineering for the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and a handful of colleagues rose to the challenge. Jones asked people he knew on the university's technical support staff to sift through piles of old backup tapes. The recovery effort was initiated by Mike Jones, a research scientist at Microsoft who worked at Carnegie Mellon when the post was made. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: The post was a simple one, even briefer than he remembered.
Last week, after months of detective work, they succeeded. But this year some colleagues embarked on an dig through Carnegie Mellon's digital archives in the hope of unearthing the original post. Fahlman, now a researcher at I.B.M., thought that his post, stored on a form of magnetic tape that is now obsolete, had disappeared. But his idea caught on, and the typed smiley face and its many variants, known as emoticons, are now fixtures online.įor years Dr. Fahlman's brief post was almost an aside, made in the midst of a discussion about something else. Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted an electronic message on a university bulletin board system suggesting that a colon, a minus sign and a parenthesis be used to convey a joking tone.ĭr.
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