The Smiley
September 19th (2002) marks the 20th birthday of the smiley emoticon. Although the original post has been lost, an archived version still resides here (http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Joke_Thread.html). It started in a thread containing a joke that some readers were taking seriously. Though the initial suggestion to prevent this in the future was to put an asterisk at the beginning of joke messages, Scott Fahlman very quickly came up with the smiley. Messaging has never been the same since.