19 Sep 2007

Smile, It’s Your Birthday

The ASCII smiley is 25 years old today. I first encountered them about 18 years ago, and the weird thing is that at first I didn’t see a face.

You see, the font on the terminal I was using put the ‘eyes’ close together, and the person contacting me was a diehard Star Trek fan (they got into heated arguments about warp drives), so I peered at the three symbols and assumed they were signing off with a little spaceship…