Emoji as the term is currently used did not, but graphical emotion/tone indicators did under a different name: emoticons. They were usually small gif files, som

Emoji as the term is currently used did not, but graphical emotion/tone indicators did under a different name: emoticons. They were usually small gif files, sometimes animated but usually not, manually referenced with img tags in your own designs rather than simply being available in commonly installed fonts (so insertable as text if you know the right unicode code/sequence) as we find today. Some forums / BBSs would automatically translate text-based smilies to relevant emoticons or provide their own syntax to add them such as [smiley-face]. Emoticons descended from the text versions referred to as smilies (https://www.csh.rit.edu/~kenny/misc/smiley.html https://www.csh.rit.edu/~kenny/misc/smiley.html). The two terms did often get confused (or just deliberately used interchangeably).