Who invented the first internet smiley emoticon :-)?

Scott Fahlman invented the first widely recognized internet smiley emoticon, :-). He proposed it in 1982 as a way to mark jokes on an online message board at Carnegie Mellon University.

Fahlman’s original suggestion came from a practical problem: written messages could be difficult to interpret, especially when readers could not tell whether a post was serious or humorous. On September 19, 1982, he proposed using :-) for joke posts and :-( for posts that were not jokes. Readers viewed the sideways symbols as a smiling or frowning face, and the convention quickly spread.

Fahlman was not the first person to imagine using typography to represent a smile. Earlier suggestions included a 1967 Reader’s Digest idea and a 1969 comment by writer Vladimir Nabokov about a special typographical sign. However, Fahlman is credited with introducing the first successful online use of the familiar character sequence.

The original message was recovered in 2002 after being lost for years. Emoticons later influenced graphical emoji, but :-) remains a text-based symbol made from ordinary keyboard characters.