:)

From: Scott And Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: 🙂

40 years have passed since the invention of emojis. On September 19, 1982 at 11:44 am Scott Fahlman, Microsoft engineer, sent this message to propose to start using punctuation to create “smilies”.

Two simple characters that, however, have significantly changed the way we communicate in our century, up to the very famous emojis that we use every day to express our mood.

To be honest, I don’t quite remember that day. Back then I didn’t think my message about 🙂 and; (would be that important. Just a silly 10 minute game, sent to friends online and forgotten. I never kept a copy of that message, and it was hard to retrieve it when we finally realized that that little message started something big and lasting. Although many of my colleagues and I remembered the original message, we didn’t know the date until we found the message in our archives twenty years later. I was surprised that the time was almost noon, normally I was engaging in playful conversations around nine, but I think I was in my office at Carnegie Mellon, on a break between a meeting and another or something similar.

These are the words of Fahlman relating to the message recovered in the old Microsoft archives, which if on the one hand they gave access to a new way of expressing oneself, faster and more concise, on the other hand they contributed to change the way of communicating, directing us towards a type of ever faster relationship, where essential information must be provided in a concise manner, where attention has increasingly limited limits and where there is no room for too elaborate explanations.

Only 40 years have passed from a “smiley” to the era of big and small data, a world that is evolving much faster than we expect and that every day reminds us where we started from, and where we can get .