Scott Fahlman posts the first documented emoticons :-) and :-( on the Carnegie Mellon University bulletin board system.

Scott Elliott Fahlman is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and scheduling in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks, on the programming languages Dylan, and Common Lisp, and he was one of the founders of Lucid Inc.

During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of Common Lisp." From 2006 to 2015, Fahlman was engaged in developing a knowledge base named Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network. He also is credited with coining the use of the emoticon.

SEF2007a
SEF2007a (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Andrew Carnegie, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing slightly left, 1913
Andrew Carnegie, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing slightly left, 1913 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Carnegie Mellon University seal
Carnegie Mellon University seal (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Watch: Scott Fahlman - C4F nominee 2011

From the WorldCommForum Davos channel.

Sources and further reading: Wikipedia — Scott Fahlman, Carnegie Mellon University (CC BY-SA). Images: Wikimedia Commons.