degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1973, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in artificial intelligence in 1977.

In 1983, Fahlman, Geoffrey Hinton and Terrence Sejnowski published a paper in Proceedings of the AAAI-83 Conference, Washington DC, August 1983.

The paper was titled as "Massively Parallel Architectures for AI: NETL, Thistle and Boltzmann Machines".

In an interview printed in The New York Times in 1969, Vladimir Nabokov noted: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.

"[5]Fahlman is credited with originating the first smiley emoticon,[6][7][8] which he thought would help people on a message board at Carnegie Mellon to distinguish serious posts from jokes.