Ready for some history? Let's go. In 1982:

- San Francisco d. Cincinnati (26-21) in the Super Bowl

- Martina Navratilova d. C. Evert Lloyd to win Wimbledon

- Michael Jackson's thriller was the top album (yes, album, NOT CD)

And something else happened--something that you might have even used today when sending an email or composing a web page:

25 years ago on Wednesday, the first email message with a smiley emoticon :-) was sent.

The sender: Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Scott E. Fahlman.

25 years have passed, and emoticons have become an essential part of communicating online. What's more, The Associated Press tells us:

Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language - to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University..."What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said. In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."

This Carnegie Mellon page has much more.

Emoticon search: the next logical step

Here at Ask.com we're happy to report that you can actually search for some of the most popular emoticons by simply entering the characters into a search box. Each result appears as a Smart Answer at the top of a results page, containing a definition of what the emoticon stands for, a link to an emoticon list, and much more.

Here are a few examples of what you can search for:

:-)

:-(

;)

X(

:-O

So, congrats and a big :-) to Professfor Fahlman at CMU.

Gary Price
Director of Online Information Resources
Ask.com

PS: it's not only emoticons that Ask.com translates. We do the same for some of the most popular chat shorthand.

Examples:
BRB
IMHO
ROFL

PPS: Speaking of Ask.com applications--and Carnegie Mellon University--here's an Ask.com embeddable map of the campus: