Happy 30th Birthday Emoticon! - as part of the news series by GeoBeats.

The famous smiley faced, happy emoticon first made its appearance three decades ago!

In 1982, that little face, consisting of a colon, hyphen and a right bracket made an appearance on the world wide web.

The mastermind behind the happy emoticon was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, named Scott Fahlman who posted the happy sign online at 11:44 a.m on September 19th, 1982.

Today that smiley face may depict a number of things, but in the 1980s, it was primarily used so online readers could understand that a post was meant as a joke.

While there is some debate over the initial inventor of the emoticon, Fahlman states “I probably was not the first person ever to type these three letters in sequence. But I do believe that my 1982 suggestion was the one that finally took hold.”

These days, there are a slew of emoticons depicting a wide range of common emotions and there are many unusual ones like the devil face, smoking emoticon and the eye-rolling smiley.

Which one do you use the most?