The original message in which the smiley was invented had been lost until September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general board was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x).
Here is Scott’s original post:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman 🙂
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
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
🙁