>>61
Before vbulletin was invented, or at least in the early days of 4chan, before it got text boards. As I understand it, for a long time Japan was as far behind the west in the internet as the west was behind Japan in mobile phones. 2ch came along just as the japanese web was really taking off.

Although there are big english forums now, none of them really approach the relative universality or ubiquity of 2ch in their own culture. The only thing that ever came close was Usenet, but that has been rendered largely irrelevant by spammers and web forums and it wasn't really anonymous. It was also decentralized, so the newsgroups you had access to depended on what your NNTP server subscribed to and it was cumbersome to download new posts one by one.