How long have emoticons been around?

[yoda313]

I guess i'm too lazy to google it

Just curious. I am assuming it was sometime when email first came into being?

Edit - I guess you could call the smiley face itself an emoticon and that has been around since the beginning of time it seems.

I almost want to think that the "baby on board" type car signs of the 80's might have something to do with it but I'm not sure about that.

[redwudz]

With lack of better info, I would go with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon They seem to date much before the internet.

[yoda313]

Thanks redwudz. Wow a published reference in 1881??? Well I guess once you have typed fonts thats all you need to get started...

[redwudz]

At some point the text emoticons were converted to graphic representations that we are more familiar with.

:lol:

was converted to by browsers.

BTW, it's really hard to show an emoticon without a conversion to the graphics representation. The conversion code is pretty invasive.

[yoda313]

The conversion code is pretty invasive.

I guess you could just space it to emphasize it:

: ) : D

Kinda like that?

[julianme]

I thought they were around since 1982 or something like this.

At least that's what it says here.