Bangalore: It’s been 30 years, since the world’s favorite icon, emoticon, took birth from the keyboard of a Carnegie Mellon University professor, Scott Fahlman.

The simple icon which represented a happy face had later blossomed into an array of emotionally filled icons. Combined with dash, colons and parenthesis, they represented every mood of billions of people around the world.

On a sunny day of September 1982, Fahlman typed out this on an online computer science board:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Who could have imagined this simple emoticon, will spread to each and every corner of the web, and will get morphed into hundreds of other emotions, including icons for even drunk, grumpy and embarrassed. The emoticons even impersonated legends like Elvis and John Lennon.

"It was ten minutes of my life," told Fahlman in an interview to the Telegraph earlier this month. "I expected my note might amuse a few of my friends, and that would be the end of it."

Today they are found in almost all the platforms, computer, mobile and everywhere and it might be the most used character in the world too.