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All about emoticons :)
Jul 30, 2007
• NYT on the history of the emoticon. (You know, the :) and 8-) faces.)
• BusinessWeek ran a very similar story six years ago.
• And here's a good resource on Japanese emoticons.
The article's at best incomplete - "emoticons" date back a lot farther than the 1990's - or even the internet.
They go back at least to the early days of Science Fiction APA's (Amateur Publishing Associations) and fanzines. I won't go so far as to say SF Fandom created them (they might, for all I know, date back to the creation of the typewriter), but I can assure you by the 30's and 40's they were in common use (or as common as they could be, when the group using them was the rather small subset of humanity called "Science Fiction Fandom...").
Lot's of the earliest internet users were SF fans and - naturally - they brought a lot of their writing conventions with them - including the :)
Mind you, they were called "bixies" back then, but they are basically the same thing.
I'd actually argue that the roots of emoticons, as visual cues to the way to read a sentence, date back at least as far as the "?" (originally "questio" at the end of a sentence, shortened to "qo", shortened to "q" over the "o", and then "?")
ditto with "!"
more at the fascinating http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/09/the-origin-of-everyday-punctuation-symbols/