The recovered messages, which you can read here, show how collaboratively the emoticon was developed—not a lone genius moment but an ongoing conversation proposing, refining, and building on the group’s ideas. Fahlman had no idea his synthesis would become a fundamental part of how humans express themselves in digital text, but neither did Swartz, who first suggested marking jokes, or the Gandalf VAX users who were already using their own smile symbols.
From emoticon to emoji
While Fahlman’s text-based emoticons spread across Western online culture that remained text-character-based for a long time, Japanese mobile phone users in the late 1990s developed a parallel system: emoji. For years, Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 set for NTT DoCoMo was widely cited as the original. However, recent discoveries have revealed earlier origins. SoftBank released a picture-based character set on mobile phones in 1997, and the Sharp PA-8500 personal organizer featured selectable icon characters as early as 1988.
Unlike emoticons that required reading sideways, emoji were small pictographic images that could convey emotion, objects, and ideas with more detail. When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010 and Apple added an emoji keyboard to iOS in 2011, the format exploded globally. Today, emoji have largely replaced emoticons in casual communication, though Fahlman’s sideways faces still appear regularly in text messages and social media posts.
As Fahlman himself notes on his website, he may not have been “the first person ever to type these three letters in sequence.” Others, including teletype operators and private correspondents, may have used similar symbols before 1982, perhaps even as far back as 1648. Author Vladimir Nabokov suggested before 1982 that “there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile.” And the original IBM PC included a dedicated smiley character as early as 1981 (perhaps that should be considered the first emoji).
What made Fahlman’s contribution significant wasn’t absolute originality but rather proposing the right solution at the right time in the right context. From there, the smiley could spread across the emerging global computer network, and no one would ever misunderstand a joke online again. 🙂