The first e-mote turned 40 this week

pcgamer.com:

This week the emote that started it all turns 40. Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, explains how the emoticon came to be on September 19, 1982. Unsurprisingly, it was because people were getting into fights online. 

According to his post on the university website(opens in new tab), in the early '80s, the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science community was really into bulletin boards—what would be referred to these days as internet forums—to talk to each other about a wide range of topics. Falman noticed that some sarcastic or humorous posts would be taken seriously and lead to lengthy angry exchanges, which would deviate from the original topic.

Of course, nothing like that ever happens on the internet of today. Never. =/

This led the professor and others to figure out ways «to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously.» Anyone who has ever gotten into an argument online with someone who fails to pick up on a joke could probably sympathize.   As Fahlman puts it, «After all when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone.»

So this is what he came up with:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke makers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given the current trends. For this, use

:-(

happy birthday :-) pic.twitter.com/ArUfGZqjinSeptember 19, 2022

From then on, users on the bulletin boards started posting their own text-based variations of the smiley face, like a smiley face with glasses or a Santa Clause. Since this was the '80s, this was all these ASCII-based computers could handle. This would then evolve into