Emoticon - Wikipedia
August 19th, 2006,Emoticon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The creator of the original ASCII emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on September 19, 1982 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later (September 10, 2002) by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.[1]
It’s nice to know that they know who came up with the idea, and that he went to my alma mater.