:-)

I don’t like the noseless variants, :) and :( . I think they look like frogs.

Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Scott Fahlman commenting on his invention of the original emoticons -- :-) and :-( -- in the 10 July issue of NetworkWorld. The nosed variants will hit their 25th anniversary on September 19th.

Fahlman also comments in the interview on Penn Jillette's and Neal Stephenson's reactions to the emoticon.

The original post, in which Fahlman introduced the smiley, was (according to a posting at research.microsoft.com) "retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x)" and read:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman      :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

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

:-(