On this day in 1982, Scott Fahlman created the smiley and frowny face emoticons (with noses) for a Carnegie Mellon message board which had problems distinguishing joke posts from serious ones. The use of :-)and :-( were proposed to denote whether one was serious or only joking, which was the first use of emoticons to have been documented. Nowadays, of course, we have the much superior emoji characters, and antique methods of communication involving brackets and colons and whatnot are no longer necessary, or wanted, in any circumstances at all. 😉
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