The Emoticon is 40!

Can you believe it?! First, that we are actually younger the emoji, which is great because it’s hard to not feel old every time you turn around today. But secondly, it’s incredible that the first emoji, your basic “colon-dash-close parenthesis” old-school smiley face 🙂 was born way back in 1982, by Professor Scott Fahlman on a Carnegie-Mellon message board. Emoticons, which evolved into the emojis we love and use too frequently today, gave a new depth of expression in written communication, and obviously have only increased in popularity over the last 40 years.