CYBERSPACE — The world of computing was a lot of things 25 years ago – but sprinkled with smiley faces isn’t one of them. Yet today, the emoticon comes not only in the traditional colon, hyphen, parenthesis format but in a wide array of keyboard and html formats, as well. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman is said to be the father of the modern emoticon, using three simple keystrokes to change the face of electronic communication 25 years ago.

The birth of an industry icon deserves acknowledgment, and so Fahlman and friends have decided to honor tomorrow’s special day with the first of what they hope will become an annual student competition encouraging technological innovation in the person-to-person communication field.

Winners of the Smiley Award will take away $500 for their efforts, thanks to Yahoo, Inc., which has an impressive array of smileys available for users of its popular Instant Messenger program.

According to Fahlman, the ease with which online correspondents can misunderstand one another while serious or jesting goes as far back as the communication medium itself. While discussion the topic on an online bulletin board at 11:44 am on September 19th, 1982, Fahlman typed “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” and encouraged his colleagues to “Read it sideways.”

Computer users have been reading it sideways ever since – and expanding it far beyond anything Fahlman and his fellow innovators likely anticipated. Suddenly able to let one another know when their comments were to be taken humorously or seriously, when their moods were whimsical or sad, the smileys began to infect the correspondence of businesses and universities throughout the world as the internet replaced local dial up BBS services.

While it’s possible that someone other than Fahlman was able to see the happy face in the three keystroke combination, he writes on the university’s smiley face specific webpage that “I’ve never seen any hard evidence that the 🙂 sequence was in use before my original post, and I’ve never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did. “But it’s always possible that someone else had the same idea – it’s a simple and obvious idea, after all,” he concedes humbly.

The smiley is such a part of the modern technological reality that, in addition to chat programs loaded with everything from yellow smiley faces to animated, face peeling aliens, even Microsoft Word replaces the keystrokes with a more conventional happy face.

“It’s been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman observed in a university statement. “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since it all started.”