互联网上红遍全球 :-)"微笑"符号25周岁
http://www.ycwb.com/ycwb/2007-09/18/content_1622062.htm
一个冒号，一个连字号，再加半截括号，就组成了互联网上常用的"微笑"符号":-)"。美国卡内基－梅隆大学说，这一符号为该校教授斯科特·法尔曼创造，9月19日，"微笑"符号迎来25岁生日。
"微笑"诞生
一切都起源于1982年9月19日。当时的电脑被称为个人微机，其中不少使用当时刚成立不久的微软公司开发的DOS操作系统。而互联网在当时刚具雏形，只有知识精英和技术专家才会使用。为"黑客"喜爱、纯粹自发性的电子布告栏系统（BBS）和相对"精英化"、由服务运营商提供的电子布告栏（bboard）几乎就是当时网络的全部内容。卡内基－梅隆等大学则在全校范围内开通了电子布告栏。
卡内基－梅隆大学的师生经常在电子布告栏上讨论各种话题，从严肃到荒诞无一不包，有时也会发生类似于后来互联网上经常出现的"口水战"。法尔曼在卡内基－梅隆大学网站专为"微笑"符号开辟的网页（http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/）上写道，由于当时的互联网只能提供纯文字的交流方式，一些原本是开玩笑的话语被"认真对待"，甚至被错误地当作了安全警告。
为了让这种情况不再发生，师生们在电子布告栏上展开了一场讨论，希望创造一个符号标出开玩笑的话语，以免造成误会。法尔曼在发言中提出，发言者可用":-)"符号标出自己开玩笑的话。他同时还提出了":-)"符号，以表明发言的严肃性。但这一符号后来逐渐演变为表达悲伤。
红遍全球
"微笑"符号的受欢迎程度远远超出了法尔曼预计。它迅速成为微机使用者的心爱符号，以它为蓝本，还有人创造出了一些新的符号，比如"眨眼微笑"符号";-)"和更为简洁的":)"。
在个人电脑与互联网普及后，"微笑"符号更是传到了世界各地，微软公司等推出的MSN等即时通讯软件还纷纷预设了笑脸图标。法尔曼说，他个人更喜爱文本形式的"微笑"，因为它比笑脸图标更"异想天开"。
在卡内基－梅隆大学为庆祝"微笑"符号25周年而发表的一份声明中，法尔曼说："看到这个符号从我花10分钟敲出来的一段发言变成一个全球性的现象让人感叹……我有时会想，25年来，有多少人曾在键盘上敲出这个符号，又有多少人侧起头看这个符号。"
"生日"考证
美联社说，目前语言学界对到底是谁发明了"微笑"符号并无定论，语言学家们似乎也无意考证。法尔曼在卡内基－梅隆大学网站上说，大学技术人员在微软公司帮助下，从25年前的历史记录里找到了他发言的证据。 25年前最常用的电子信息备份介质是磁带，技术人员耗费大量时间，最终找到了记录法尔曼25年前发言的磁带，也确定了这一符号的诞生时间：1982年9月19日11时44分。
Digital symbol that brought a smile turns 25 :-)
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2007-09/19/content_6116477.htm
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.
To mark the anniversary today, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc, carries a $500 cash prize.
Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.
Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 am on September 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly."I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."
The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile - or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
Computer science and linguistics professors contacted by The Associated Press said they were unaware of who first used the symbol.
"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," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea - it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."
Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics, said Ryan Stansifer, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.
"Now we have so much power, we don't settle for a colon-dash-paren," he said. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.
"It has 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 said. "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 this all started."
Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."
"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language - to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said."What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.
