In my first developer role over 20 years ago we worked on email systems and we also had a Japanese office. One summer one of the Japanese developers came to wor

In my first developer role over 20 years ago we worked on email systems and we also had a Japanese office. One summer one of the Japanese developers came to work with us to add support for "emoji", which at the time was only a Japanese encoding thing afair. I remember being incredulous, thinking to myself "how could we add such a hack and ridiculous thing to our systems?" It just made no sense to me to add pictures to text encodings, like can't we just send images? Shows what I know, ha.