Did you know that the smiley emoticon is twenty-five years old today? I sure didn’t and am amusingly surprised!

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes—a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis—as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.
To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.

Hey, 500 bucks is 500 bucks! I’ll smile for that!