At 11:44 on 19 September 1982, Scott Fahlman posted a message on the Carnegie Mellon computer science general bulletin board, known as the bboard, proposing :-) as a marker for jokes. The post is reproduced on Fahlman’s page at CMU, which carries the full thread around it.

The message, sent from the address “Fahlman at Cmu-20c”, read in full: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(“

The original message was lost for years, according to Mike Jones, who started the search for it in February 2002.

The thread

According to Fahlman’s page, there were apparently a few posts before 16 September 1982 that asked what would happen to various objects in an elevator if the cable were cut. Those earlier posts were not on the tape that was later retrieved.

One post asked about a helium balloon in free fall, and another asked about pigeons flying inside the falling elevator.

A third post then asked what would happen if the birds were breathing the helium. Fahlman wrote that, given the quality of the elevators in Wean Hall, “this was more than idle speculation.”

The messages that followed are the ones that mention the need for a joke marker or use :-), and Fahlman’s page reproduces all of them. The bboard had no formal newsgroup threads at the time, he wrote.

The backup tape

Jones, who worked at CMU when the post was made, began the search in February 2002. He went through the sources of an old bboard program called Bags, worked out that the post would probably be in a file called /usr/cmu/lib/bb/general.bb, and asked Howard Wactlar, the former CMU SCS facilities director, whether it could still be restored.

Fahlman supplied data that narrowed the likely span of time in which the post was made.

Wactlar and Bob Cosgrove, the director at the time of the search, established that backup tapes from 1981 to 1983 still existed and asked Jeff Baird of the facilities staff to find and restore the post. Dave Livingston of facilities located a working 9-track tape drive and a machine to run it on.

Kirk Berthold and Michael Riley in CS operations handled the retrieval of tapes from off-site archival storage. The tapes were in 4.1BSD dump format, and a FreeBSD machine belonging to grad student Dan Pelleg read them using a compatibility mode in the restore program, with a NetBSD machine used later in the effort.

Dale Moore looked for the post on Tops-20 backup tapes from CMU-20C.

Jones wrote that “by all accounts, Jeff Baird should get most of the credit for doing the hard work of locating and retrieving the data.” Baird kept asking for more tapes, read the ones that could still be read, narrowed the date range and stuck with it until the post was found.

Baird pulled the post from the October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax, a machine known as cmu-750x, on 10 September 2002. Fahlman called the effort “an impressive piece of digital archeology, with many contributors.” The tape covered the period from 16 September 1982 through 21 October 1982.

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