Those were "emoticons", which used plain ASCII, and were sometimes converted to proprietary icon sets within forums/IM clients/etc. So, entering :-) would rend

Those were "emoticons", which used plain ASCII, and were sometimes converted to proprietary icon sets within forums/IM clients/etc. So, entering :-) would render a smiley face sometimes. However, it wasn't a Unicode character that retained meaning independent of the specific implementation. Eg, :grr: might render on phpBB, but nowhere else.