Previously that had been one of the differentiators between GNU Emacs and XEmacs, the latter more enthusiastically adopting GUI-, image-, and mouse-related features. I believe XEmacs got inline-image support sometime in the mid-'90s, and showed it off by including a display of the XEmacs logo in the default startup buffer.
Fwiw, it was added in Emacs 21 (2001): http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/New-...
Previously that had been one of the differentiators between GNU Emacs and XEmacs, the latter more enthusiastically adopting GUI-, image-, and mouse-related features. I believe XEmacs got inline-image support sometime in the mid-'90s, and showed it off by including a display of the XEmacs logo in the default startup buffer.