The Microsoft dingbat font developed in 1990 was Wingdings.
Wingdings is a symbol font that displays pictographic glyphs when ordinary keyboard characters are typed. Microsoft assembled it in 1990 from symbol sets associated with Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows, and Lucida Stars, whose designs were created by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It became widely available with Windows 3.1.
Wingdings could place telephones, hands, arrows, stars, zodiac symbols, and other images into documents without importing separate pictures. In that sense, it resembles an early, font-dependent ancestor of emoji. However, its symbols were not independent Unicode characters at first: the same underlying character could display differently when a particular font was installed.
That limitation is an important distinction. Modern emoji are standardized Unicode characters or sequences and can be rendered across systems, although their artwork varies by platform. Many symbols originating in Wingdings and Webdings were later encoded or represented in Unicode, but Wingdings itself was not a universal emoji standard. Webdings, released later, is a related but different Microsoft font.