



Various American Commodore 64/128 BBS-software from the 80s and 90s. via
Scott E Fahlman suggests a use of :) and :( in September, 1982. This happened on a bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. It caught on pretty fast, and in November there were already several variations.
There are many older examples of emoticons, but this is likely what popularized emoticons as we know them today.
In November 1981 in UK, Kenneth Baker, the Minister for Information Technology, proclaimed 1982 as “Information Technology Year, IT-82” to support the use of IT, like teletext and viewdata. via
Oracle Teletext 1980s, via.