BBC - Get Writing - Smileys - : "The original smiley was created in 1964 by commercial artist Harvey Ball, who died in August 2001 aged 79. A few decades ago, smileys were virtually unknown on Earth, but once they migrated to the Internet their population exploded in email and chat rooms, and new strains developed which are now to be found throughout the World Wide Web.

Much research has been devoted to understanding the structure of smileys and it was discovered that they are essentially simple lifeforms.
For example, typing :-) at the keyboard denotes a smiling face, and ;-) denotes a smiling face with one eye winking: the derivation of smileys as combinations of colons, dashes and brackets becomes obvious if you tilt your head through 90 degrees to the left...

The claim to be the first person to use this system on the Internet belongs to Scott Fahlman, who attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and supposedly used an emoticon on the CMU Bulletin Board between early 1981 and mid 1982. While there are, of course, rival claims, this one is the most widely recognised."
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