Twenty five years ago, a Carnegie Mellon professor suggested the emoticons as markers for jokes and serious threads on an old school bulletin board system.

Professor Scott Fahlmann said in a post on the bulletin that the emoticon was to mark a joking thread and the _ was to marks a serious thread.  These were the first emoticons and now they have evolved into graphics, and hundreds of other expressions!

Given today’s sluggish news, I guess this is the most significant event today.  Besides, emoticons are mostly the only way we can communicate our emotions on the web.

 Yahoo’s emoticon list.