I'm reasonably sure they had graphical "emojis" rather than just ASCII "emotions" like :-). They weren't called "emojis" at the time of course, but basically, it's the same thing.

True. And interestingly, the term "emoticon" was used both for the basic "ASCII" and fancy graphical representation. And while some "ASCII" sequences were present on multiple platforms, the meaning quite unsurprisingly often diverged, just like you implied. See some:

        [MSN emoticons]  vs [Yahoo emoticons]
    :-* "Secret telling" vs "kiss"
    8-| "Nerd"           vs "rolling eyes"
    :|  "Disappointed"   vs "straight face"

[MSN emoticons] https://web.archive.org/web/20031206095746/http://messenger....

[Yahoo emoticons] https://web.archive.org/web/20080408053458/http://messenger....

N.B. some of them are animated. Animated fonts coming when?