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<blockquote data-quote="Bob Blaylock" data-source="post: 371965" data-attributes="member: 16749"><p>I've long thought of the whole “smiley” thing as a rather lame joke that jumped the shark long ago.</p><p></p><p> Long before any but a tiny handful of the public knew about, much less had any access to the Internet, I was a very active participant in the “BBSing” scene. A BBS usually consisted of a computer with a modem, set to answer the phone, receiving calls from other people using computers with modems. You could read messages that other people had left there, and post messages of your own. If was very much like a very primitive forerunner of forums such as this one, but not involving anything like the Internet, a BBS could usually only service one user at a time, and access was via a direct telephone call from one modem to another. Any given BBS usually had a vast majority of its users within a local calling area; not many people were willing to pay long-distance tolls to call BBSes that were not local calls. Later on, networks of BBSes developed, where, during certain hours of the day, instead of taking calls from users, the BBSes in a network would call each other, and pass messages around, so that a message posted in one forum on one BBS would, within a few days, appear on all the other BBSes that carried that same forum.</p><p></p><p> Anyway, I remember when the discovery reached BBSes in my area, that if you typed a colon, a hyphen, and a closing parenthesis, the result looked like a sideways smiley face. I though this was rather clever, about the first half dozen times or so that I saw it.</p><p></p><p> Whatever short-lived cleverness the original “smiley” ever had, any remaining vestige was, in my opinion, completely and permanently destroyed when forums begin intercepting that and similar character sequences, and replacing them with graphic image of smiley faces.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bob Blaylock, post: 371965, member: 16749"] I've long thought of the whole “smiley” thing as a rather lame joke that jumped the shark long ago. Long before any but a tiny handful of the public knew about, much less had any access to the Internet, I was a very active participant in the “BBSing” scene. A BBS usually consisted of a computer with a modem, set to answer the phone, receiving calls from other people using computers with modems. You could read messages that other people had left there, and post messages of your own. If was very much like a very primitive forerunner of forums such as this one, but not involving anything like the Internet, a BBS could usually only service one user at a time, and access was via a direct telephone call from one modem to another. Any given BBS usually had a vast majority of its users within a local calling area; not many people were willing to pay long-distance tolls to call BBSes that were not local calls. Later on, networks of BBSes developed, where, during certain hours of the day, instead of taking calls from users, the BBSes in a network would call each other, and pass messages around, so that a message posted in one forum on one BBS would, within a few days, appear on all the other BBSes that carried that same forum. Anyway, I remember when the discovery reached BBSes in my area, that if you typed a colon, a hyphen, and a closing parenthesis, the result looked like a sideways smiley face. I though this was rather clever, about the first half dozen times or so that I saw it. Whatever short-lived cleverness the original “smiley” ever had, any remaining vestige was, in my opinion, completely and permanently destroyed when forums begin intercepting that and similar character sequences, and replacing them with graphic image of smiley faces. [/QUOTE]
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