40 years ago, Scott Fahlman invented the computer “smiley” to communicate without misunderstandings

It’s an invention that is in all of our lives, our emails, our text messages: Scott Fahlman, 74, invented the smiley computer, two points for the eyes, a dash for the nose and a parenthesis for the smile. A symbol that the French Academy advises us to call the “frimousse”, while in Quebec, it is called “hoe”. Indispensable for some, too familiar for others, nevertheless: no one escapes it in 2022. Everything that Scott Fahlman had not imagined when he used it for the first time in a message on the 19th September 1982, 40 years ago.

He was then a professor of computer science, specialist in algorithms, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania in the United States, and to better communicate with his colleagues and students, to avoid misunderstandings and misunderstandings, he offered them this system, a face who smiles to mark the second degree, and a sad face, with the parenthesis in the other direction for serious or serious subjects. He sent this message to the school’s online newsletter, a sort of prehistoric intranet, and immediately his system was adopted. Then shared out of school, imitated, developed, “without a doubthe told CNN, because the communication problem we had had was experienced everywhere else the same, when there is only very short text and no body language or facial expression, sometimes people can’t tell if what you write is serious or not.”

In the age of the internet and mobile phones, our exchanges have been shortened, synthesized as much as possible, even if it means sometimes creating confusion, which has made the smiley unavoidable. In the early 2000s, it gave way to the emoticon, the yellow and round face, then inspired the emoji which now symbolizes much more than facial expressions, from the disco ball to the piece of cheese. Today, there are more than 3,000 symbols.