There was incredible amount of stuff you could do in text, like ･゜ﾟ･:.｡..｡.:･'(ﾟ▽ﾟ)'･:.｡. .｡.:･゜ﾟ･. or ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣◇￣)┘

And people started to have auto pasted ascii art.

That’s the point where emoji is a more concise, explicit and less cumbersome system.

We should see emoji as standardization and putting a business tie on chaotic expressions to pass them down the line in a limited amount of bytes.