Today in 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed for the first time the use of :-) and :-( to help people on a message board at Carnegie Mellon University to distinguish serious posts from jokes.
Fahlman message read:
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(
This was the first known use of emoticons (a combination of “emotion” and “icon”) in a digital context, but they have been suggested and used before. For example, four vertical typographical emoticons were published in 1881 by the U.S. satirical magazine Puck, with the stated intention that the publication's letterpress department thus intended to "lay out ... all the cartoonists that ever walked."
And in 1912, Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation – the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus ‿ and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence."