People used typed symbols to show feeling long before computers, from 19th-century Morse code abbreviations such as 73 for best regards to 1880s newspaper punctuation that signalled joy and melancholy. The modern emoticon came in 1982, when Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed :-) on a bulletin board to mark a joke as a joke. He had posted a joking warning about mercury in an elevator, which some readers took as a real emergency, so text needed a way to signal humour and sarcasm. The symbol spread to ARPANET and Usenet within months, and it later inspired a whole vocabulary of faces, such as ;-) for a wink.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.