4chan/History

‘’This timeline is the collective effort of thousands of anons over the span of a decade, passed down from generation to generation, rescued from wiki to wiki.’’

‘’Record the milestones, disasters, and achievements, of today, so it will not perish from the memory of the anons of tomorrow.’’

What needs Work

 * Link to the 4chan News page or 4chan Blog for any site-wide structural changes.
 * Add more primary/secondary sources, from thread screencaps to news reports, or even archived websites on Archive.org.
 * If you desire to make your page invisible on google, message the website owner and ask him to make a robots.txt.

Pre-History
* 1988 - The dawn of an era: Christopher “moot” Poole is born in New York City, New York. * 1996 - A man named Masayuki Shiba creates a BBS called Ayashii Warudo (Strange/Suspicious World). Users are anonymous. Warez and cp are posted, and there is a “gesu” (scum) board where a group of the same name discussed and conducted website hackings and invasions. Many similar BBSes are formed, collectively called Nanashi Warudo (Nameless World), they develop a culture based on memes. Ayashii World functions as the hubsite of Nanashi World in a similar way to how 4chan would later function as the hubsite of Anonymous. AW’s popularity increases exponentially. History of Ayashii World. * 1998 - Ayashii World doesn’t have good servers, and it keeps crashing. After the owner receives personal threats over the server issues, he shuts the site down. They need a replacement. They get their replacement with Amezou, the First Channel, run by Amezou-shi. It starts off as a bunch of links to alternative BBSes for wayward Ayashii Worlders, but soon becomes its own forum and introduces a new style of threaded message board, dependent on bumping and saging. Its popularity increases exponentially. * 1999 - The administrator of the first channel closes the site due to vandalism, before that, he makes a plea for its users to make more sites like Amezou. A man named Hiroyuki Nishimura sees all this and creates Ni Channeru (2channel), the Second Channel, using code based on the first, with enough servers this time to handle the exponential growth. Meanwhile, Lowtax creates Something Awful. * April/May 2001 - Lowtax creates the ADTRW (Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse) board on Something Awful. * August, 30, 2001 - 2channel is in danger of dying, so a backup forum is created, called Futaba or 2chan (two-leaves). Futaba invents a board called /b/ for random content. The site supports images and deve p