Before there were actually forums, we used to battle in AOL chatrooms, the old Freestyle rooms were the best.
Napster originally had a freestyle chatroom where a lot of them happened. Often the other members of the chat would throw up words for the emcees to then incorporate into their verses to prove they weren't biting or hadn't pre-wrote their stuff. The other members of the chatroom then judged.
The earliest text battles as we now know them would have been around 1995/1996 with the likes of Jamies Crackhouse, Sethros etc
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