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Origin of all text and imageboards can be pinpointed to one specific person and no it's not Nishimura Hiroyuki.

>1995 Japan, Sarin Gas attack in Subway Station happens
>Some time later, an unknown Japanese programmer releases an edgy game about the sarin attack that was the biggest terrorist attack in the country in the same year
>Tons of backlash at the time, which popularizes the game inevitably
>A man named Shiba Masayuki tries to upload this game to some website
>He gets scolded for it and is told to remove the game
>Later he decides to create his own website to upload the game and discuss it
>His websites continuously get deleted but he manages to cultivate an edgy underground subculture
>He creates Ayashii Warudo in 1996 (Strange World), the first if not one of the first textboards ever. The topics are mostly edgy stuff similar to old /b/
>In 1998 Shiba Masayuki decides to delete his own website because his servers kept crashing and received death threats over it
>People from Ayashii Warudo migrated to a website called Amezou, which was similar to Ayashii Warudo, but was created after it
>If I get it right, Amezou faced the same problems as Ayashii Warudo did and servers got bloated. Also Amezou faced a lot of vandalism from Ayashii Warudo users and its admin also received some threats as Shiba did.
>Nishimura Hiroyuki then decides to create 2channel, to ease the traffic. The name both refers to a tv channel and to mean it's the second Amezou in the year 1999
>Years later
>Moot decides to copy the Futaba Channel (2channel clone) because anime threads are banned on Something Awful forum in the year 2003

Sources:
https://archive.md/2018.06.07-203906/http://f16.aaacafe.ne.jp/~stwalker/#selection-21.100-21.335 (in Japanese)
https://en.namu.wiki/w/5ch (in broken/machine translated English)
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/10/26/programmer-shocks-internet-with-subway-nerve-gas-game/