It is hard to imagine today's digital communication without them: smileys.
But the “faces” made up of combinations of characters and letters once had to be invented - and the presumably first message with smileys will now be auctioned by the US auction house Heritage Auctions until September 23.
Many consider Scott Fahlman to be the forefather of the smiling digital smiley “:-)”.
The computer scientist who worked at the University of Pittburgh had first proposed the combination of colon, hyphen and closing bracket on September 19, 1982 for use in this context.
"We could use the following symbols to mark jokes: :-)", Fahlman wrote in a message on an online university notice board at the time, including an important note: "You have to read it sideways." And he immediately made another one second suggestion: “In view of the current trends, it might make more sense to mark things that are NOT jokes.
Use :-( “.
Starting bid of $ 1000
The 39-year-old message is now set to change hands. According to Heritage Auctions, the initial bid for the so-called NFT, which contains the original notification from Fahlman, is $ 1,000. An NFT (non-fungible token) is a type of digital certificate of authenticity: there can be any number of identical copies of the item, but only this one can be considered the original.
As Fahlman, who is now retired, recently explained in an article in an online magazine, he invented the smiley at the time because the message board kept causing misunderstandings in satirical articles. "I got the impression that a kind of laughing face like the one we saw on t-shirts and balloons in the 1960s would be the most intense way of saying, 'I'm just kidding!'" looked at the available signs and first considered how to represent the eyes, “the most important element of the face”. The first thing that occurred to him was the "ü", which does not exist on the American keyboard.
Finally, he had an aha moment with the colon: “Maybe we can make a wrong, smiling face that people recognize. We would have to tell them to turn their head to see it ... ”. Although Fahlman found the idea that came up within ten minutes clever but not particularly special, it spread rapidly across campus and beyond: "The idea went viral before 'going viral' was even an issue," says Fahlman. He suspects the reason for the success of the smiley to be its simplicity: You don't need any special codes or menus - you just have to start typing on it.