Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed | Hacker News Reader

Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

cs.cmu.edu

350 pointsZeljkoS146 comments

Nabokov's interview. The New York Times [1969]

     -- How  do you rank yourself among writers
     (living) and of the immediate past?

     -- I often think there should exist a  special  typographical
     sign  for  a  smile -- some sort of concave mark,
     a supine round bracket, which I would now like to
     trace in reply to your question.

Which had already been used in the days of the telegraph.

The first use of OMG (oh my god) and other such initialisms was 19th. C.

I would imagine that includes :)

Also interesting, there is a set of telegraphic codes used to decrease the size of messages due to cost:

http://people.eku.edu/styere/Encrypt/ABC4/

Definitely has to be one of the earliest examples of electronic signal compression.

Even beyond explicit codebooks, telegraph operators extensively used standardized abbreviations, meaning what they actually sent/received was remarkably similar to SMS text-speak, for obvious reasons! "Wr r ty gg r 9" => "Where are they going for No. 9?": http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/11/history_of_t...

Do you have a source for this?

It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming and hackerish about showing it as a 7-bit glyph.

I think the Internet fundamentally changed when that happened.

Tangentially-related, I can't fathom why someone would post YouTube videos of `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl`.

My biggest problem with this is when the images auto-replacing your text emotes convey a completely different expression, and you have no control over it.

Skype is the worst offender, where for example the ":3" cat-face gets replaced by an image of a whole cat, without a face at all. If you disable this "feature" in your options, it's only disabled on YOUR end. The receiving client will still convert your text into images, so now you have NO clue at all how the receiving party interprets your expressions.

Telegram does this RIGHT, where the conversion is done BEFORE your message is sent. If you disable it on your end, the receiver will only receive the text you intended.

The worst is if you are trying to do a letter-indexed list of items and B) gets coverted to a guy with sunglasses.

For those that might not get the reference: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=...

Try sending a code snippet in any modern chat

Telegram is pretty good with that. One ` for inline code, three for blocks of code.

Actually Skype is great with code.: just prefix your message with "!! ", or surround it with triple backticks, and it will treat it as code.

Triple backticks also works in WhatsApp.

Emojis are stunningly ugly to me, though I did appreciate throwing out the custom doge and Doom space marine ones at random when my team used Slack.

I think it's a cultural thing - or more precisely, a non-culture-specific thing, which should be as unoffensive as possible.

Honestly, I don't envy those that design and publish emojis, it's a cultural minefield. :-) has no color, gender, outfit or what-have-you. There's been a lot of debate about the skin tone of e.g. the thumbs up emoji (which now comes in half a dozen colors if the relatively ambiguous / non-human yellow isn't to your needs), the gender of emojis depicting jobs, and the color of outfits of emojis depicting jobs.

The smiley is an efficient general-purpose abstraction of reality; the emoji is a million instances of copy-pasted overly-specific code.

Emojis are in Unicode. They aren't parsed or converted to multiple glyphs anymore, the text editor will provide them directly.

http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that.

Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.

As a college student, I use emoji constantly to communicate all sorts of abstract sentiments, but in my experience they can also be irritatingly ambiguous and highly dependent on cultural norms and interpretation.

Take the thumbs up emoji - within my social circles, the exact same emoji can be interpreted both as a enthusiastic agreement ("Sure!") and also as a sarcastic affirmation ("Good for you.").

It's often difficult to infer the intended meaning, even with context, and in some circumstances I've found emojis have actually added significantly to the ambiguity and cognitive burden in parsing a text. That's not a problem I have often faced with simple smileys.

We need an emoji to represent sarcasm that we would put at the end of the message, like the use of "/s". And I think this would count as grammar.

There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/

Maxor~ ellioid; s~h~ush UPCOM, shud shout aout aout. Ellioté brooghund brooghund.

See for example the translation of moby dick into emoji as a prototype of emoji as language

I find that they're often too cutesy or overstated. In Whatsapp for example, they come across as incredibly flirtatious.

The winking smile should be jokey but I can only interpret it as flirty nowadays ;)

Since I alternate between the smile and winking smile about evenly, you're making me reconsider my past text conversations. ;)

I use the winking with tongue sticking out to mean a joke... but I don't know if everyone else interprets it that way ;) (that was a flirty wink)

Kyle McLaughlan explains a former project: https://ello.co/codenamesarah/post/s9dx9cx_iw6ytktbugjwmq

Emauj'ib

I'm with you. I put a space between the : and the ) to prevent the graphic emoji : )

That automatic emoji concept can be quite annoying sometimes.

For instance, Outlook 365 will automatically turn "B)" into the "smiling face with sunglasses" emoji. I cannot fathom this use case. Apparently someone at Microsoft thought that things like, oh, a fairly common styling of a simple lettered list (A) Do this B) Do that C) Etc.) and parenthesized words / sentences ending in capital B (abbreviations will get you there, like say BBB) are not very common in corporate communication. The need for a smiling face sunglasses clad emoji was much stronger. Go figure.

Pasting bash snippets into chat is so frustrating when clients try to render emojis :/

Fortran also suffers from this problem:

real, intent(in) :: f(:,:,:)

Going the other way often works too! (:

Which looks like a bald person without a mouth to me :-)

Somehow I've become accustomed to 'read' emoji as tilting your head to the left. Turning the emoji around always reminds me of German books, which often have the title upside down on the book spine compared to English / Dutch books.

It's somewhat amusing that even the first IBM PC had a smiley character. It's character number 1, no less (in code page 437).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

My workaround is a nose :^)

Apropos is this debate about whether an intentional :) shows up in a 1648 poem:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/15/emotico...

Here's the verse:

Tumble me down, and I will sit

Upon my ruines (smiling yet :)

I think that the article does a fairly convincing job of showing that this is just weird 17th century typography, but then again, there was enough experimentation with printing at the time that it also wouldn't surprise me if it was intentional, at least at some point in the typesetting process.

Huh. That helps explain one I found from the 19th C.: https://www.flickr.com/photos/abecedarius/3054204291/ a little below middle: "... philosophy in small :)"

Like most of the cultural inventions of virtual communities there was prior art on PLATO.

http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...

Those emoticons seem to have been in many ways better than :-) and its relatives, but it sounds like they 1) relied on details of the platform, and (related) 2) never caught on more broadly. So I think it's still reasonable to celebrate the invention of :-) (while maybe imagining how much richer text conversations might have been if the PLATO text-display system had become ubiquitous).

I was definitely using :-) on Plato in 1979. I'd be surprised if Plato was the first use, though.

Interesting thing to note is that before Fahlman suggested ":-)" symbol, Leonard Hamey suggested "{#}" (see 17-Sep-82 17:42 post). After that, someone suggested "\__/" (see 20-Sep-82 17:56 post). But only ":-)" gained popularity.

It is funny to imagine how emoticons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons) would look today if one of alternative symbols was accepted?

Not only # \__/ and :-) were suggested but also '&', which the explanation on why is (to say at least) imaginative:

17-Sep-82 17:40 Keith Wright at CMU-10A *%&#$ Jokes! No, no, no! Surely everyone will agree that "&" is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter). It sounds funny (say it loud and fast three times). I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum of the CRT it would even smell funny!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

would be interesting to know where that one started...

There is a whole parallel smiley history from Asia that either hasn't been documented as well as the western smileys or simply hasn't been translated.

The notable thing about asian smileys is that they have the same horizon as the text, whereas western smileys needs to be turned 90 degrees. Compare (^.^) with :-)

So given that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is both unicode and horizontal indicates that it is either from Asia or came to be after asian smileys became more prevalent in the west.

> compare (^.^) with :-)

I have no mouth and I must smile

I done screwed up. I hope nobody saw...

>_>

<_<

>_<

(I always felt like finding some of these alt smilies increased expressiveness)

Interesting that Japanese smileys show emotion via the eyes while the American-born ones show emotion via the mouth, which mirrors the respective cultural norms.

m =^_^= m

TIL it's a kaomoji :-)

Here's an article by a regular user of the emoticon http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the-be...

And a wiki about those characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana

Probably Japan. ツ is a very common Japanese charterer pronounced "tsu".

As wodenokoto said there is a whole separate history of Asian smileys that are right way up, with the face in the middle and various decorations on both sides. They did have the advantage of a larger set of characters from the start.

One example predating computers is "henohenomoheji", a face made out of Japanese hiragana, used as a generic face in children's art and crafts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henohenomoheji

I am guessing, but I'd suspect one of the better known imageboards like 2Chan, 4Chan or Ylilauta.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Of course, Fahlman is a Lisper, so of course he's going to use parens... ;)

I don't understand "{#}" and "\__/". Are they supposed to be arbitrary markers, or interpreted in some way?

"{#}" was proposed because it looks like teeth showing. "\_/" was proposed because it looks like a smile.

I'm trying to visualise the first one, but the only thing which comes to mind is Jaws from the old James Bond films.

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/jamesbond/images/8/86/Ja...

That's why they didn't catch on.... not very intuitive.

{#} would be a grinning mouth with teeth showing, and \__/ is a smiling mouth.

Interestingly, I've seen \_/ used these days to refer to a dumpster.

I've seen \,,/ to refer to the "rock" hand gesture.

And \\//, to refer to LLAP

The second one could be interpreted as a smiling mouth.

I think.

I guess they might look a bit like the ones at the bottom under "Eastern".

Perhaps {#} would have evolved into Japanese-style emoticons like: (-_-) and (^.^)

If only we had a upside down '^' character, smaller than a 'v' though.

You mean like ⌣ U+2323?

I vividly remember having the following conversation with a fellow CMU undergrad around this time:

Me: What's with all the :-) in the posts?

Friend: It indicates joking.

Me: Why?

Friend: What's it look like?

Me: A pinball plunger.

Friend: Rotate 90 degrees.

Me: Ohhhhhh.

:-)

I think this is one of those things that once you see you can never unsee. :-)

had a similar thing happen first time seeing: lol

thought it was a plate with knife and fork..

Ah bulletin boards :)

For years I have been searching for a copy of Blue Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Board_(software)), a popular BBS program in the Vancouver, BC, Canada area written by the late Martin Sikes http://www.penmachine.com/martinsikes/

I even talked with the owner of Sota Software, the publisher, but I never heard anything back.

If anyone has a copy, PLEASE let me know! I've been wanting to setup a memorial telnet Blue Board site for decades now.

This is gold:

"Since Scott's original proposal, many further symbols have been proposed here:

(:-) for messages dealing with bicycle helmets @= for messages dealing with nuclear war"

"o>-<|= for messages of interest to women"

I'm glad we are past that.

Past what? Topics interesting to women? Though I agree that this emoticon is ugly and it took me some time to understand what it symbolizes.

Past the point where we thought that ideas should be or even can be segmented into those interesting to women vs those interesting to men, which is a rather silly idea rooted in gender unfounded stereotypes and possibly a bit of sexism.

We're not even close to past that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women%27s_magazines

https://m.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes

It's still acceptable to categorize clothing stores by sex as well.

"The new fragrance, for her"

"Manpurse" (as in, saying "purse" implies "woman")

Razors for men and for women, exactly the same thing but one is pink, one is blue

Bicycles for women with different frames (because they always wear skirts, y'know)

Running shoes for women (pink) and men (blue)

I could go on...

> Bicycles for women with different frames

This one in particular I never quite grasped. I mean, there've been a couple times, when I stopped short and came off the seat and pedals, that I really wished, in an extremely immediate and visceral fashion, that my bike's top tube wasn't quite where it was.

On the other hand, I suppose the "women's bike" design probably lacks something in rigidity by comparison, so I suppose there's an argument either way.

So I had heard that women's bikes were designed that way to allow room for riding in a dress.

Apparently people still do this: https://letsgorideabike.com/2012/06/04/how-to-bicycling-in-a...

That's exactly what I've always been told. If you're wearing a skirt/dress, the bar on a guy's bike will push your skirt up and create a scandal :O

So "girls' bikes" have a dip in the bar so there's room for a skirt/dress. Still, I wonder if there's a reason they just didn't make all bikes like this to make it cheaper for the manufacturers.

I'd imagine the straight bar could offer more rigidity or I guess maybe it costs slightly more to make the curved version with a longer bar and the process of making the curve. If that's the case, I guess margin-shaving bike manufacturers only made as many of the curved model cycles as they had to in order to address the demand from skirt/dress-wearing customers.

Tsssh. Toilets too. :-)

And toys. The local Target has "girls" and "boys" sections. I'm wondering what my daughter is going to say when she finally notices that half the stuff she likes is filed under "boys."

But more specifically, that the default topic is those interesting to men, needing no special indicator.

Funny. I'm just a couple years removed from that thread (I was an undergrad then) and I don't even "get" that emoticon. A person standing on a platform with her arms in the air?

Edit: nevermind. Was explained while I was typing.

What does it represent? I doubt understand it

It represents a person (presumably a woman) wearing a dress/skirt.

  o>-<|=

  o    head
  >    arms raised
  -    torso
  <|   skirt
  =    legs

It's a skirt

It's a woman on a pedestal, like the expression: "women should be placed upon a pedestal." The phrase is usually understood to mean that men should treat women with respect, treating them as if they are more important than themselves.

I also thought pedastal. I guess it has been a long time since I've seen a woman wear a skirt. But I think your interpretation of why is off. I was looking for something sexist (as per OP) so the pedestal fit that for me. I presumed it was an inside joke amoung guys. But since someone pointed out the skirt I know know I was reading into it incorrectly

Wow, that's a lot of downvotes. Mind telling me why?

I didn't down vote you, and I have no special insight into why others have, but my guess would be that at least some of those votes were meant to indicate disagreement with your interpretation: I think more people see the equal sign as representing legs, rather than a pedestal.

If I were to speculate further, I would suspect that some people are wary of interpretations of ambiguous texts that unnecessarily imply sexist/culturally fraught meanings.

Thanks for taking the time to share that.

Well first, that's not an expression that anyone uses. If there is one, it's the opposite of that. Also, your interpretation of that is incorrect.

Putting something on a pedestal is bad. It's pretending that it's perfect. If you put a person on a pedestal, you remove their humanity and flaws and aren't treating them like a person.

I'm in my 50's, and it was a common expression when I was a growing up.

Thanks for the insights, I've must have understood the expression differently.

I did find references to the contrary like [1] where the interpretation I've always had is expressed. Why are you so certain?

[1] http://www.city-data.com/forum/relationships/1064051-what-do...

Those references all seem to be negative as well. Which one do you think agrees with you?

I can't understand the confusion here - which bit is hard to follow, the graphic or the sexism?

I don't see it, anybody care to explain?

It's a woman in a dress, like you might see on a bathroom door

It sort-of looks like a person standing on a pedestal...

It's a girl with a skirt/dress.

The <| is a skirt.

Virtue signaling much?

We are?

I'm sure :-) has been independently invented a million times.

Indeed, there is evidence of the kind of typographic play behind the 'smiley' from as early as the 19th century:

http://theday.co.uk/arts/internet-celebrates-thirty-years-of...

Back in my UO days we used =] because it was quicker to type and the in-game font made it look better than a traditional smiley.

I see one Guy Steele in that thread. Is he the Guy Steele? Glancing wikipedia suggests he was asst prof at CMU around that time. Just curious.

Indeed it is - Fahlman worked with Steel et. al. on Common Lisp.

Other notable folks I recognized in the thread:

* Dave Touretzky - author of a well-regarded Lisp textbook in its day

* Masaru Tomita - the guy who invented the GLR parser

| I have a picture of ET holding a chainsaw in .press file format. The file exists in /usr/wah/public/etchainsaw.press on the IUS.

:-)

I don't get it

I love how different the conversations were on the internet then.

Now adays, if a thread came about to propose the ':-)', people would devolve into a debate about the proper use of the parenthesis, and at least one user would claim that '(-:' was a better choice, though it is the darkhorse option for the community.

I wonder how many times the initial turn head, grok, smile -- mirroring back to the pareidolia itself, has happened.

Interesting that there are both left-handed and right-handed smileys in the thread. :-) (-:

Interestingly, before I read this post and the comments, I have always thought that :-) means a smiling face. Ie, to convey a sense of a smile after writing a message. Not a "I am joking" message.

Well, I learned something today.

At some point between 1982 and the late nineties ;) replaced :-) as the joke indicator. But with modern WhatsApp rendering ;) as a suggestive grin instead of a simple wink I imagine the current generation of teenagers has found a new innocent joke marker.

At least anecdotally, I've always seen/used :P much more that ;) for funny. ;) has always been more flirty/suggestive, but that may be having spent more of the 90s in MUDs/MUSHes with a greater sense of roleplay.

Definitely in modern emoji sets the tongue out emojis seem to be better indicators of an intended sense of humor more than flirty/suggestive ones (plus the combo ;P for intending flirty and funny).

I beleive the modern usage is no longer to denote a joke. Merely to express a smile.

And the proposal to have a separate channel to jokes is as old as the smiley. There is always that guy.

Have anyone thought about creating a separate HN for jokes?

Well, there is /r/hackernews...

It's just a mirror of submissions... Actually kind of useful if you want to search for a submission that you saw on HN a while ago.

There's a pretty decent search field at the bottom of the page if you hadn't noticed. Not sure how it compares to the reddit search mechanism though.

I use hn.algolia.com

I wonder at what point the nose was removed :)

Mid- to late nineties, to the best of my recollection.

Monday Sept 19th would've been the 34th "smilaversary".

love birds

  (@> <@)
 ( _) (_ )
 /\     /\

  $ apt moo
                   (__) 
                   (oo) 
             /------\/ 
            / |    ||   
           *  /\---/\ 
              ~~   ~~   
  ..."Have you mooed today?"...

19-Sep-82 11:44, Scott E Fahlman invents the ':-)'.

Nice. :-)

did you mean that as a joke? or do you really think it's nice? <:-)

I think it's cool to see this more or less live in action, and in the original context, yes (not sure what the emoji is for that). With many terms/ expressions, it's very unclear where they originated, so if this is indeed the first usage, it is nice to see.

Probably the first time online. There are print antecedents to online emoticons.

"Read it sideways. " hahaha love this!

Reading these BBS always makes me think how much nerdier computer people were back then than they are now. Or am I off base?

There was a strong selection effect at the time.

(｡◕‿◕｡)

I see you

I... now find myself morbidly curious as to whether you could use Unicode diacritic abuse to draw actual pictures.

Pasted in example stolen from Glitchr, mainly to see how well HN renders them:

̝̞̟̠͇̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍ ̎̏̐̑̒̚ ̕̚҉ ̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔ ̿̿̿̚̕̕̚̕̚͡ ҉̵̞̟̠̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̟̠͇̊̋̌̍̎ ̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̚̕̚҉ ̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔ ̿̿̿̚̕̕̚̕̚͡ ҉̵̞̟̠̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̟̠͇̊̋̌̍̎ ̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̚̕̚҉ ̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔ ̠̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓ٴٴٴٴٴٴٴٴ -ٴٴٴٴٴٴه ٴٴٴٴٴٴٴٴٴ ٴٴ...

Wow that's interesting

Deleted comment

Here is a list of popular emoticons: https://textfac.es/

Usenet archives are also a treasure trove for this kind of things. Searching old posts on Usenet feels like modern day archaeology

See in particular something like alt.fan.warlord

This is creepy. I just opened a PR on GitHub and set the description to ":-)". Then I opened HN and saw this.

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