The birth of emoticons

In the early days of the Internet everything was done with only text characters, there were no graphics.  People writing messages in online forums created a clever way to add more character to their messages by arranging the standard characters of a colon, dash and close parenthesis so they would resemble a smiley face when viewed form the side. The basic smiley face emoticon was often used to add a kind of tone of voice to text to help indicate sarcasm or humor. This helped cut down on people getting the wrong idea and getting angry over something that was not meant seriously. Soon people started substituting in different characters to create a whole list of emoticons to show surprise, anger, humor and a variety of other emotions.