If you impressed yourself when you invented a smiley, you shouldn't be. ;-)

http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html

Man, I hate to like Microsoft.

Andrew

:-)

:-(

ah...a fellow screensavers fan... :D

Al Gore invented the Internet, and he invented smileys too! This is a big conspiracy to patent smileys and charge smiley users millions in royalities a year! Fight the power!

Well, maybe not. :stickout

While I won't doubt that a considerable amount of time was spent to find this message, I'm not sure one can determine (100%) that this person was 'the inventor of the smilie'... computers haven't been around all that long, while typewriters have and one can do the same thing on a typewritter. I'm guessing it was done at least once before September 10, 2002 (though the post seems to be marked September 19, but anyway).

I suppose 'wide=spread use' is what they are talking about, not a single instance, however he could have gotten a typewritten letter with a smilie and then posted that. Anywhooo, I'm not impressed and need more evidence. Samuel... ohhhh Samuel where are you?

Al Gore invented the Internet[laughs] so I've heard...

Hey Chicken,

I'm sure you meant
19-Sep-82 11:44

right? :)

Greg Moore

Wow! That's some interesting trivia! :)

But how can Microsoft be so sure that there weren't incidents prior to that? :confused:

well they can't really. Even the article mentions that they were looking at data they could recover, so there's a possibility is was being used previous to that. Of course in 82 the list of people 'online' was a whole lot smaller, and I'd imagine something like a smiley would have travelled across BBS's pretty quick.

While not a 100% fact, I'd say it would be pretty close.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27107.html
puts a little context into things

Greg Moore