It was back in 2000 or 2001 I joined, definitely before the Belgium game where we lost 2-0 and our WC '02 campaign ended as I remember organising / researching some stuff for that on the TAMB.
The main thing I remember about the early days was that a week after I joined, a soon-to-be-infamous poster named Hawkeye Ranoo started posting, after finding the board through his son Richie. I think for the first month or two he wrote constantly in slang, all 'ra' this and 'ra' that, before he got so much stick he cut it out. I never even knew such such a dialect existed up until then, I expected all weegies to write slang like it was in the Broons.
Every day's a school day on the TAMB.