Regarding the content. There was another company that did the design work, a bunch of it in flash; but also in HTML for the message boards and stuff that we integrated into our PHP forum that had all the actual messages stored in MySQL. I'm not sure what would have happened to any of that when VillageWorld (the company that did the backend at least initially) went bust in 2004; or if it was migrated away or shut down before that.
The live chats were either IRC with a Java web client or we also had an NPH script that we could of used, but I don't remember which ended up being "real" at this point. There were definitely some that were organized and others that were not.
Care to give more details, stories, etc? BowieNet sounds fascinating to me.
There's so much data today, everything is stored and categorized, but I still believe that, say, 20 years from now, a lot will be lost nevertheless. No matter how easy it is to store stuff today.