On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 a.m., Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Scott Fahlman posted the first documented emoticons, 🙂 and :-(, to the school’s internal electronic bulletin board.
The context was pure inside joke: someone on the board had made a comment about a mercury spill in a building elevator, and a few people took it seriously enough that a discussion broke out about how to mark posts as jokes versus genuine warnings. Fahlman’s proposal — read the punctuation sideways, smiley for humor, frowny for anything serious — was meant to solve that one specific problem on one specific message board. Instead it became, by most historical accounts, the first digital emoticon, predating emoji by decades and giving plain text a cheap way to carry tone that it otherwise lacked.
The original post was thought lost for years until it turned up in an old backup tape in 2002, letting historians confirm the exact wording and timestamp. Fahlman has said since that he never expected it to spread beyond his own department, let alone become the ancestor of the emoji keyboard on every phone today.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University, Wikipedia
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