26 years ago to the date Scott Fahlman posted the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
: – )

Fahlman says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post.

With that post suggesting funny emails be marked out, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. Today the emotion+icon combination has spawned a thousand others and rarely is an online conversation complete without one.