That's not true. It was just bespoke. The first general-purpose "forum" software was mid-90s per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum but initial one-off implementations grew out of the BBS scene that goes back to the 70s and 80s. They were pretty universally crappy, and just north of "guest book" comment lists, but they did exist.
That said, enough of the early stuff in here mentions newsgroup that it was at least seeded from Usenet. By 2000, though, Usenet was essentially dead for actual communication use so I'm guessing the later stuff in here was done within a forum.
Might not have been this forum, though. It's on phpBB, which only goes back to 2000, and more tellingly, the domain was registered in 2012.
I'm impressed, TBH. The bottom really dropped out of Usenet when it started getting used as a file transfer mechanism, and most conversational traffic moved away from it.
That seems to be a commom theme. Reading this, I feel guilty for not actually understanding how to compose a regular expression. I use a generator when one is necessary.
I can give you something close to that. In a thread from 1995[1] some users were skeptical and not buying the C++ hype:
> A typical programmer uses FORTRAN, COBOL, C or if they believe the hype, C++. Typical programmers don't use functional languages.
From quite a few posts I saw I gathered that a lot of people thought C++ was not going to gain any real adoption, and an OO C was stupid. Which, looking at it from today’s point of view is hilarious. Makes you wander what new thing we’ll all think is just a trend but will become ubiquitous in 20 years.
Each sub forum seems to have died suddenly at some date, different for each one. What's going on here? It's like the scene in a book where they're going through the remains of some dead civilization and saying "food still on the table, doors open... Whatever happened here, it happened suddenly."
I guess with this revealed as being fake, the solution is: each "subforum" is really the copy of a different newsgroup, and each copy was covering a different time range.
That one has only faded into obscurity in the last 5 years or so. I remember specifically searching for programming related content on Google as late as 2012-2013 and getting Experts Exchange results. I search every single day now for programming related content though and haven't seen an Experts Exchange result in at least the last 3-4 years.
I remember the only reason I installed the GreaseMonkey plugin on Firefox was to have a script that would scrub ExpertsExchange from Google search results. Prior to StackOverflow, it had incredible SEO for tech questions.
Compare
http://computer-programming-forum.com/80-microsoft-visual-c-...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22Don$27t$20want$2...
Wayback Machine earliest snapshot is from 2012. It probably never was a proper forum.