Cast your mind back 25 years… and you’ll see a world where the Internet was barely imagined, spam was a tinned meat product and the 87 million people who use email every day were, you know, talking to each other.

Back in 1982, a small group of geeks were wondering how to inject some emotion into their online communications. To solve their problem, Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, created emoticons. Staring at the keyboard sideways, he smiled to himself. Then he typed his smile :-)

Within days, the smiley face was sweeping the ARPAnet (the Internet’s precursor) and other emoticons were being created, allowing geeks to show:

• Laughter :D
• Flirtation ;)
• Teasing :P
• Frowns :(
• Confusion :\
• Surprise :O

Today… there are countless emoticons that allow us to add some feeling to our emails, instant messages, blog and forum posts, and even to text messages on our mobile phones. As Fahlman says, it’s hard to convey meaning without body language or tone of voice, so these little faces “humanize what is otherwise a cold medium.”

Happy 25th birthday to the emoticon. Party on! <|:-)