The ubiquitous :), an icon of the Internet, found life rather simply, in an email post to a Carnegie Mellon mailing list made by one Scott Fahlman. Fahlman proposed the use of :) to delineate non-serious posts from serious answers, advising readers to “read it sideways”. And so the smiley was born.

Today, the smiley is often used to pre-emptively defuse so-called “flame wars”, by indicating to readers, “Hey, no worries, I’m just joking around!” Often it is the resort of a sarcastic post. The simple history of the emoticon just goes to show that sarcastic smart-asses have always found a home on the Internet, even before the advent of the World Wide Web.