You can blame David Auerbach for the smiley face emoticon. He invented it when he worked for Microsoft on its messenger service in the late 1990s, fresh out of Yale.
Auerbach had always been precocious. He was the first kid on his block in 1980s suburban Los Angeles who had his own computer, an Apple IIe, which he got when he was six. His parents, both psychiatrists, pressed science fiction paperbacks into his hands. Their house was strewn with Prozac- and Zoloft-branded pens and mousepads. When he was 13, he read all of Vonnegut in two weeks. The first program he wrote was a single line of code: “Draw a square.” By age eight, he was writing code to create long animated movies in Logo.
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