Hi all, Time for an update... It's hard to believe that Smiley's 84th birthday (and Frowny's too) are coming up next Saturday, on September 19. Time flies... The Smiley Day celebration on the CMU campus in Pittsburgh will be on September 17, Thursday, because the 19th is a Saturday, and there is a big Career Day event on the 18th. And it will probably be inside the CS building on campus, since unsettled weather is being predicted. If we get some good photos of the event, I'll post them here. I've seen some discussions online about whether the :-) and :-( were the first Internet "Memes". Of course, that depends on how you want to define "meme". I think that a stronger claim can be made: these two "emoticons" (that term came later), were the first things to actually "go viral" on the Internet. Actually, my message proposing these two symbols was posted on our local-area network within CMU's Computer Science Department. The Internet didn't exist yet, but we were connected to a few of the other leading CS departments in the U.S. by what was called the ARPANET, run by the U.S. Department of Defense. Within a few days this :-) message was passed on to people at all those universities, and wherever these messages arrived, some people started using these glyphs in their own Email messages. And, that same year, DARPA started the process of transferring the unclassified portions of the ARPANET to civilian control, initially run by the U.S. National Science Foundation. And then, other universities in the U.S. -- even ones without military research contracts -- could join this network if they had the right hardware. The resulting network went through a number of name-changes, but soon the name "Internet" took over. And soon there were links to CS research-oriented networks in other countries around the world. Whenever a new group of people joined the network, Email from established Internet users was sure to follow. And these messages were the vectors carrying the "emoticon" virus. It wasn't until the mid-1990s, when computers became less expensive and the Worldwide Web standard was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, that non-technical people started having computers in their homes and started using Email in their daily lives. As soon as that happened, the long-established emoticon "virus" spread to the general public as well. When home computers finally started to have bit-mapped graphics and color, the stage was set for graphical Emoji to appear. So the :-) and :-( emoticons "went viral" on the ARPAnet before the Internet even existed, and they immediately infected the Internet, when it first became "the Internet", a few years later. Amazingly, these silly memes are still being used today, millions of times each day. And their immediate descendants, the emoji, are used billions of times each day. So, Happy Birthday to :-) and :-( , getting older but not yet ready to retire.

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