>>23224137
https://www.big.or.jp/~talk/t-club/soft/mini_r6/index.cgi
>imgboard is the world's first*1 “image bulletin board,” continuously improved based on user requests to become an easy-to-use platform.
It is renowned as the synonym for image bulletin boards*2. (Over 5,000 installations, hundreds of thousands of users*2).

>*1. In 1997, staff struggling to print photos from the newly released first-generation digital camera “CASIO QV-10” (Note: Color printers were still expensive at the time) combined the new “file attachment” feature of “Netscape 2.0β” with bulletin board CGI to create the world's first “image bulletin board allowing direct file posting over the internet.”
https://www.big.or.jp/~talk/t-club/wwwboard03/index.html is the oldest member of the image BBS family tree! It's extremely fitting that it's a modification of an even earlier script called WWWBoard.

>*2. The unique user-submission, reply-based photo community UI style developed by imgboard to meet user demands and expectations was directly inherited via several Japanese clone scripts by sites like America's 4chan.org (currently exceeding 9,000,000 monthly views, one of the world's largest sites). As of 2013, it remains popular within American anime communities and similar groups.

So imageboards were invented by Japanese digicam nerds to share pictures they took.
Also, that means the first English-language imageboard wasn't world2ch in 2003.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020617042129/http://www.big.or.jp:80/~talk/t-club/soft/mini/imgboard_e.cgi
This site claims they opened their English PHOTO BBS August 24, 1998. Seems like it only ever got a handful of posts, though. I wonder if there were any other English imageboards before world2ch.