The invention of the smiley :-) (PCGH-Retro, September 19)

…1982: Expressing one’s own mood in digital messages will be easier from that day on: On September 19th – more precisely: at 11:44 am – the emoticon, also known as a smiley, is invented. In a discussion on the computer network at Carnegie Mellon University, the student Scott E. Fahlman suggested that joking posts should be marked with a smiley made of ASCII characters placed sideways: 🙂 Serious posts should be identified by a :-(. Although the meaning of the characters changes slightly over time, the idea of ​​the ASCII face catches on Many other characters have previously been discussed for these purposes, see the full original debate here.

…1989: An early variant of the “Year 2000 problem” crashes some computer systems. Some programs can only manage 2^15 different days, i.e. exactly 32,768 days since January 1, 1900, the starting point of their calendar – but September 19, 1989 is therefore day number 32,769.

…1994: Apple announces that several manufacturers have been licensed to manufacture Apple clones with Mac OS. Previously, Apple had always refused to allow clones – the very clones had hurt IBM’s PC business but helped the x86 PC to break through overall. But not much can be heard from the alternative Macs.