Scott Elliott Fahlman (born March 21, 1948) is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and scheduling in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks (especially the cascade correlation algorithm), on the programming languages Dylan, and Common Lisp (especially CMU Common Lisp), and he was one of the founders of Lucid Inc. During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of Common Lisp." From 2006 to 2015, Fahlman was engaged in developing a knowledge base named Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network. He also is credited with coining the use of the emoticon.
Scott Fahlman in the context of Smiley
A smiley, also known as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram representing a smiling face. Since the 1950s, it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a line representing eyes and a mouth. More elaborate designs emerged in the 1950s, featuring noses, eyebrows, and outlines. New York radio station WMCA used a yellow and black design for its "Good Guys!" campaign in the early 1960s. More yellow-and-black designs appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, including works by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963, and Franklin Loufrani in 1971. The Smiley Company, founded by Franklin Loufrani, claims to hold the rights to a version of the smiley face in over 100 countries. It has become one of the top 100 licensing companies globally.
There was a "smile face" fad in 1971 in the United States. The Associated Press (AP) ran a wirephoto showing Joy P. Young and Harvey Ball holding the design of the smiley and reported on September 11, 1971, that "two affiliated insurance companies" claimed credit for the symbol and Harvey Ball designed it; Bernard and Murray Spain claimed credit for introducing it to the market. This referred to the Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance Company of America and the Guarantee Mutual Assurance Company of America, whose 1963 "Smile Power" campaign first distributed smiley buttons to employees. In October 1971, Loufrani trademarked his design in France while working as a journalist for the French newspaper France-Soir.Today, the smiley face has evolved from an ideogram into a template for communication and use in written language. The internet smiley originated with Scott Fahlman in the 1980s, when he first theorized that ASCII characters could be used to create faces and convey emotions in text. Since then, Fahlman's designs have become digital pictograms known as emoticons. They are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the yellow and black design.
View the full Wikipedia page for SmileyScott Fahlman in the context of Emoticon
An emoticon (/əˈmoʊtəkɒn/, ə-MOH-tə-kon, rarely /ɪˈmɒtɪkɒn/, ih-MOTT-ih-kon), portmanteau of emotion and icon, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail.
ASCII emoticons can be traced back hundreds of years with various one-off uses. The protocol as a way to use them to communicate emotion in conversations is credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and :-(—in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, using Japanese's larger character sets. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986. They are also known as verticons (from vertical emoticon) due to their readability without rotations. This is often seen as the 1st generation of emoticons.