The emoticon :)

Credit: Benj Edwards / DEC

Ars hit a homer. In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon. 

To whit

On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.

The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon’s “bboard,” which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.

That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” He claimed that an elevator had been “contaminated with mercury” and suffered “some slight fire damage” due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.

In reading the Ars piece, WarGames and the first connect I made to the "web" comes to mind as the awesome sound the 8.4k baud modem made, linking yours truly to the outside world, was stellar to the max. :)

WarGames

The weapon used in the 80's ... :)

Backgrounder ...

The 1983 movie WarGames introduced many people to modems. In one pivotal scene, Matthew Broderick’s character David uses his modem to systematically dial every single number in a specific area code hoping to find the number for a video game company so he can play the latest games. This is an actual technique that was used by hackers in the 1980s and 1990s to find phone numbers with connected modems. This process came to be known as Wardialing after the movie, and a variant of the term is even used today – Wardriving (a process of looking for open WiFi networks while driving in a vehicle).

My connect was not as fancy as this because B&W ruled once the connect was made. :)

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut