Comment by badc0ffee
15 hours ago
IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font.
:-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.
Microsoft Office used Wingdings, but forums (based on e.g. phpBB) or IMs would replace :) with an image.
You're probably right about the terminology being around for a while, but I think most people just called them smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah, that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed that nobody used that term colloquially.
I completely forgot about "J" and the discourse it causes amongst my friend group.