Yup, in case you haven’t heard, this guy : – ) is now 25 years old. And he doesn’t look a day over 19.

It is interesting to me to see how many bits and pieces of computer history are actually preserved. Like we really do know who invented emoticons. It was a professor at Carnegie Mellon that claims that he was the first to put together some punctuation marks and tell people to “turn your head sideways” to read them.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started.”

Read the full story on Yahoo