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 ...

Facebook lets you add special characters such as smileys, hearts and diamonds by using the "Alt" key codes that are built into Windows. There are several hundred special characters that you can choose ...

Scott E. Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University claims to be the inventor of the smiley, or emoticon. What started as a colon and an end parenthesis in 1982 on a university bulletin board to indicate a ...