First smiley found

According to TheRegister, the original smiley, or emoticon, which is believed to have been invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, has been recovered by Microsoft researcher Mike Jones and staff at Carnegie Mellon University. The smiley, made up of punctuation marks in the form of a face, was believed to have been lost, but has been painstakingly recovered by the researchers, which makes you wonder what Microsoft research really gets up to most of the time. Fahlman apparently didn`t keep a copy of his original mail with the smiley but was able to narrow down the dates enough to make the job just a little bit easier. Coincidentally the date of the first smiley was 19 September 1982 so we`re in time for its anniversary. The smiley was developed because university staff had been looking for a way to signify jokes and humour in e-mails. [More at TheRegister]

Motorola wheeled out a selection of its latest broadband technologies at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, including a handful of set-top boxes. Among these is the DVi1000 set-top box, which the company says can be marketed at the same price as analogue set-top boxes but with the extra channels available with digital cables. One up from this is the DVi3000, which has a greater range of channels and features hyperlinks, reverse-path communications and video on demand. Motorola has also been showing off its media platforms including what it calls the Digital Convergence Platform, which combines an interactive digital receiver with other home systems such as DVD and CD players, and an audio and video receiver.