There was a premine. The aim was to premine up to 50% of all coins, i.e. up to 25 billion coins. There was also one pre-launch test of the SMLY in one classroom. Both are described in
http://tutor-web.info/smileycoin (made public before the launch) - but not the details which are given below and you can check by looking at the source code at github.
Rather than mine for a year, the premine was implemented by premining the first 1000 blocks, each with a 24 million coin reward. That gave 24 billion SMLY in the premine, well enough below the 25 billion that we could easily run the in-class tests without hitting the 25 billion limit. The in-class tests needed to have a few small miners running, but you'll see in the code that they ran with the regular rewards of 10000 SMLY (which we also needed to test, just to make sure that the switch worked).
What we did not realise was the unfortunate consequence that the coin explorer shows all the individual 24 million coin transactions. It would have been simpler to just premine a few, each e.g. with a 6 billion reward. Then the coin explorer would just show those 4 largest addresses each with 6 billion and not 1000, each with 24 million.
The net effect is the same -- the actual implementation is just unfortunate since it shows a less clear picture in the coin explorerer.
