Hey, just saw this on AOL:
THE smiley computer symbol
celebrates its 20th birthday today.
The simple text picture - which represents a smiling face - sparked a revolution in computer communication and spawned a whole language of similar symbols.
The smiley is now used daily by hundreds of millions of people worldwide in emails, Instant Messages and mobile phone text messages.
The colon, dash, bracket arrangement is used as shorthand to indicate anything from a bad joke to 'have a nice day'.
A full language of similar text pictures, known as emoticons, has emerged.
Now a computer researcher claims he's found the first ever smiley, on a bulletin board at the Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, on September 19, 1982.
Mike Jones at Microsoft's Systems and Networking Research Group says he unearthed the original emoticon after six months of 'computing archaeology'.
The discovery was made after he and former colleagues trawled through logs from bulletin boards at the US university.
They say the definitive posting reads: "I propose that the following character sequence for markers
."