Smileys are tiny pictures made from ordinary ASCII characters that are meant to be looked at with the head tilted to the left.
Smileys came about when e-mail correspondents felt the need to convey emotional content such as sarcasm, laughter and other feelings as part of their messages.
Without smileys, simple statements could easily be misinterpreted:
You're an idiot! :-)
Sometime during 1981, Scott Fahlman, who is now a Principle Research Scientist in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, devised a scheme for encoding and conveying one's feelings as small text glyphs to overcome this frustration.
Scott was the first to use smileys in electronic mail and in posts to BBS message boards and Internet newsgroups, as well as in personal e-mail.