The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

Microsoft has traded in its black cowboy hat for an Indian Jones fedora and unearthed a bit of archeological history.

The first ever smiley -- created in September, 1982 -- was unearthed from tape-backups this week. The smiley is not the first emoticon, but is considered by many to be the evolutionary apex of emoticons, stemming from early experiments with rare ASCII characters including the ampersand, pound and percent symbols, and with such queer evolutionary offshoots as the infamous "Shrager Binary Humor Scale."

All of this tells us that early use of the internet was just as bland, trivial and mind-numbing as it is today, but just a little bit geekier.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27122.html

The Reg -- as usual -- debunks the myth that the Smiley originated in 1982. While that may be the first recorded ASCII Smiley, there were many other Smileys produced years earlier.

Bork!!