Thread: Was the YNOT messageboard the first forum on the entire Internet?
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Old 12-27-2014, 05:26 PM  
mineistaken
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt View Post
No it's not highly unlikely the first forum was an adult webmaster forum. I believe YNOT's forum started in 1996, the Internet was a vast wasteland pretty much in '96, most of what you would find on the WWW with your Netscape browser were porn sites, link lists/indexes and free pics and ugly personal homepages. Yahoo I think existed, AOL of course - but I had never seen a forum before YNOT's. My interests at the time were news/politics, sports and porn - never saw a political or sports forum as I surfed around back then.

Not claiming YNOT was the first but it is possible.
I found something:

The very first software dedicated to forum protocol was WIT, which was developed by the W3 Consortium in 1994.

So if YNOT was started in 1996 it is safe to assume that they were definitely not the first
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