Before everyone started using unicode for emojis, other systems existed. Maybe they weren't technically emoji since that refers to unicode, but chat clients supported graphical smilies and the like.
I wonder if they had sea horses and if some of us are remembering that.
From the searching I was just doing, I have seen a couple people specifically say Skype and MSN Messenger had it before they switched to using unicode emoji. No screenshots, though.
Also I'm pretty sure we started calling them emoji immediately, long before they were in unicode. The name was to distinguish them from emoticon, the plain text ones like the ancient :)
I wonder if they had sea horses and if some of us are remembering that.