Protos

That is the claim of the platopeople.com site

The PLATO system, started way back in 1960, was developed as a technological solution to delivering individualized instruction, in thousands of subjects from algebra to zoology, to students in schools and universities across the nation. As the system grew and evolved, it became, pretty much by accident, the first major online community, in the current sense of the term. In the early 1970s, people lucky enough to be exposed to the system discovered it offered a radically new way of understanding what computers could be used for: computers weren’t just about number-crunching (and delivering individualized instruction), they were about people connecting with people. For many PLATO people who came across PLATO in the 1970s, this was a mind-blowing concept.

Most people in Denmark anyway remembers two computers as the first ones: the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore vic 20 and mostly Commodore 64 as the first computers available to home users:

But it turns out that the Plato was an even older system, that didn’t make it to the mainstream market.

As they put it:

This book is the story of the people that were a part of that online community — the first real online “virtual community”, pre-Web, pre-AOL, pre-USENET, pre-BBS, pre-everything.

well! back to the topic of this post turns out these people had emoticons alreaye in 1972:

So basically the common understanding that Scott E. Fahlman invented the emoticons in this post:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman 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 :-(

But with the Plato system you were able to put Characters on top of each other

well I guess I am a nerd then ;-)