From a 1982 Arpanet post made just after the invention of the internet emoticon:
Because you can’t see the person who is sending you electronic mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or joking. Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one’s messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters :-) they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says “Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)” you know they are joking. If they say “I need to talk to you :-(“, be prepared for trouble.
I’m going to break a personal rule and give you just one link to chew on this post: the recovered 1982 Carnegie-Melon University chat thread in which emoticons were invented. There was a reason the text smiley was invented, and it wasn’t because some twelve-year-old couldn’t figure out a better way to express himself. It was created because a pHD-holding researcher at Carnegie-Melon realized that text without bracketing has an incredibly hard time communicating emotion, even between friends and colleagues.
Posted by Gordon Levine 
Genghis Philip
Gordon Levine