Usenet, bbs. There are a lot of forums that predate the web.

They weren’t called that, were they? Usenet was just Usenet, or “news.” BBSes were BBSes.

And in context, “forums” was presented opposite plain text, and pre-web stuff tended to be plain text.

	▲	bluGill 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They were still forums. And there were some graphical usenet clients that were arguably better than any web forum - 35 years latter and much better graphics toolkits exist today. similiarly, not all bbses were text basee, though with modem being so slow that was the default.