Tuesday, September 18, 2007

What are you smiling about?

Tomorrow is allegedly the 25th birthday of the ASCII smiley-face. When I read about this I initially scoffed, but the story of its birth is actually pretty interesting. The idea was to communicate attempted humor/sarcasm to prevent other nerds from responding to your BBS post with diatribes. So the smiley face really did benefit society. And aren't you glad this

:-)

Won out over this?

\__/

That second one just looks like a soup bowl.

3 comments:

Mike said...

Japanese smilies are entirely different, too. ^_^

Roman said...

That emoticon always looked more like a smirk than a smile to me.

Unknown said...

LOLZ LOLZ the SmiLeeZ IZ Auld, K?
TheyZ 4 Sux0rz.

... wow, that's the first time I inadvertently incorporated Old English into my 133t speak posts. Of course, I can't say I haven't incorporated Olde English into others.