Happy Birthday Emoticon! :-) Turns 32 Years Old This Week

By John Dodge

CHICAGO (CBS) :-)

Today, everybody knows that combination of a colon, dash and parenthesis is a smiley face.

Until 32 years ago this week, that's all it was, a series of nonsensical punctuation.

Then, Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, proposed using those marks to depict a smiley face--or a joke.

People had to be told to turn their heads to recognize the features.

The modern-day emoticon was born.

At first, people devised a series of different combinations to depict different emotions, like a digital version of Morse Code.

:-( (Sad face)

;-) (Winky face)

:-O (Surprised face)

:o) (Clown face)

Here is the original proposal from Fahlman:

The emoticon has certainly evolved since then, with a tiny graphic image to depict just about anything. They are everywhere, from email, to texts to social media.

Wikipedia has an extensive list of text-only emoticons.

Emoji is a cousin of emoticon, and was originally developed in Japan to depict a variety of graphical images.