EMOTICONS 2

Everyone knows what they are! You can see emoticons on WhatsApp, in e-mail messages, in chatrooms, on t-shirts, almost everywhere! However, the happy face, or smile which came before thousands of emoticons, has been around for decades. Charlie Alzamora was a programme director at a New York radio station in 1962. He claims that his station made the happy face popular because they had put it on sweatshirts that they gave away as promotional items. However, David Stem from Seattle claims he invented the smile in 1967. By the end of the 1960s, one could see happy faces everywhere in North America. But the emoticons came in the 1980s when online bulletin boards first appeared. It was difficult back then to understand if the messages were serious, funny or sarcastic, so people needed to develop emoticons. They could easily be made using the regular computer keyboard characters. Now, thousands of emoticons appear on numerous web-sites, and so many new ones appear every day. It is impossible to keep track of them all.