My Decade of Turning 50

Oh a story I just read brought back memories of first going online, in those heady days of chat rooms in AOL — the smiley face ASCII art — you know, these — is turning 25 years old. According to this article:

Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

Now, you type those and animated moving smiley or frowning or crying faces come up. But when I first got on AOL oh so many years ago, the was like some secret language I was learning. And there were many others. Remember these, which I found on wikipedia:

(Smiling)
=) (Smiling)
;] (Winking)
:] (Neutral Expression)
:/ (Partial half smile)
(Frowning)
:’( (Crying)
(Smiley with nose)
(Talking)
<:o) (party smile) :p (Poking his toungue out)

Ah, makes my turning 50 heart miss the good old days.