35 years old smiley!

19.9.2017

This year the traditional and familiar smiley of brackets and dots turns 35 years old!

The Faculty of Natural Sciences joined the celebration of the birthday of smiley. Students with joyful smiles visited the directorates and deans, the structural subdivisions and even the university administration. Everyone was given yellow paper circles on which they personally painted the smileys of their mood.

Many of us cannot imagine communication on the Internet without these familiar smileys. But do you know the history of smiley?

On September 9, 1982, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University, Scott Fahlman, sent a message to the university’s electronic bulletin board in which he suggested that Internet users use the sequence of characters – “:-)” as a marker for humorous messages when communicating on the web. The scientist explained his choice by the fact that this icon is similar to a smiling face.

Now a lot of emoticons have been invented to denote all kinds of emotions – joy, sadness, surprise, amazement, anger, etc.. But the first smiley actually was just a smiling face, consisting of a colon, a dash and a closing brace :-). Hence the name – smiley.

The idea of ​​this symbolization of emotions with the help of symbols pleased the students, and the smiley instantly gained universal popularity. Soon to designate different kinds of emotions, they came up with various combinations of symbols. New emoticons are appearing to this day, so there is no clear unified stable set of signs for denoting emotions. You can use those icons that better convey the emotional coloring of your message.

Graphic emoticons in the form of pictures, not signs, have gained popularity with the appearance and popularization of a large number of Internet forums and blogs. But emoticons from symbols also do not lose their popularity and are very widely used all over the world.

Smiley, undoubtedly, is a wonderful invention that helps to better convey the emotional coloring of messages. Sometimes these few “scribbles” make us smile, sad, laugh. Of course, live communication is always better, but it happens that a person is far away from us, and then the Internet comes to help, messages and smileys among a set of letters remind us of real smiles of relatives and people close to us!

The student-teaching staff of the Faculty of Natural Sciences congratulates you on the holiday and wishes everyone a good and smiling mood!

According to the Faculty of Natural Sciences